


Hells Angels Ain't Just a Rival MC

by SylvanWitch



Series: Biker 'Verse [1]
Category: Sons of Anarchy, Supernatural
Genre: AU, Apocalypse Crossover of Doom, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-09 06:58:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 61,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester goes to Charming, California, expecting to find the final battleground of the Apocalypse. What he doesn't expect is Jax Teller and the Sons of Anarchy doing their dangerous best to keep the peace when the rest of the world's going to hell--literally. The Hells Angels aren't just a rival motorcycle club anymore, and Jax and Dean are going to do what they can to keep the world from ending for everyone, even if it means they die trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hells Angels Ain't Just a Rival MC

**Author's Note:**

> This is Volume One of the Biker 'Verse, which started out innocently enough as a lark in response to the LJ Supernatural Crossover Big Bang in 2009. Since then, it's expanded over the years into a now six-volume epic.

_If you can believe the prophets nowadays—and you probably can’t—the bible got it only part right.  Robert Frost said something about fire and ice.  He was maybe closer.  Anyway, the end is coming.  I just hope my boys are well clear of it when it comes down.  Still, Sammy worries me._   (Book of Johns 3:14-20)

 

Blood bursts over the hood and windshield like a geyser, hard enough that it sounds like pounding rain and Dean ducks, curses, scrabbles frantically for the wiper switch with one hand, the other firing wildly out the window, one shot, two, three, the sawed-off scattergun going Boom!  Boom!  Boom!

 

More blood, this time on the rear window, and then he’s clear of the worst of it, the beasts falling behind him in a moaning, mangled wreck.

 

He tries to roll up the window, fails, and finds a human molar jamming it at the rubber.

 

With a grimace of disgust, he picks it out of the crevice, wipes his wet fingers on his filthy jeans, and rolls up the window.

 

At last, he can turn down the music a little.  Fucking things hate loud music.  Learned that in Reno.  Or was it Tucson?

 

Damned if he knows.  Zombies are zombies, and they’re everywhere.

 

Fucking Croatoan virus.

  
Fucking apocalypse.

 

Sighing, Dean glances over at his passenger, who is still, miraculously, asleep.  Grinning a little at that—she can still make him smile, even after all this time together—Dean puts both hands on the wheel and the pedal to the floor.

 

They’ve got at least sixty miles to go until asylum.  Sanctuary’s harder and harder to find in the end times.  He’s hoping the old wards still hold on what’s left of the Hopi res.  If not, they’re shit out of luck.  Have to hope for a desert stronghold up in the red rocks, or maybe some stray petroglyphs he can make into a sacred site.

 

Dean scratches the crust of beard on his jaw, feeling dried blood flake off, and then reaches behind him to fish the last of the beers out of the cooler on the backseat.

 

Pabst, in cans, and warm, too, but what the hell. Beggars can’t be choosers. 

 

The pop-top makes a satisfying hissing sound, which evokes a whine from beside him.

 

“You know it ain’t good for you, hon,” he says, glancing over at the blonde head resting on the seat beside him.

 

The dog lets out a put-upon sigh and closes her eyes. 

 

He named the golden retriever Cindy, short for Cinderella—the band, dude, not the Disney princess.  Please.  All that blonde hair had to count for something.  She’s been riding shotgun for four months, his constant companion.  In contemplative moments, Dean tells her she’s the longest commitment he’s ever given to a girl.  Usually, she just lolls her tongue out and smiles.

 

That’s fine by him.

 

They’re racing the sun now, watching it slide slowly down the sky ahead of them, filling the windshield with pink and gold.  Pretty, but deadly.

  
“Like some women I used to know.”

 

The smile doesn’t take up much of his face, only a corner of his mouth lifting in memorial to people long gone from this world.  Ellen.  Jo.  Missouri.

 

He unrolls the window long enough to toss the empty out and hear it make a clatter against the shoulder behind them before rolling it back up again.

  
Chances are there isn’t an airborne contagion left that can kill him.  Experience suggests that the last thing Castiel said to him (well, the second-last thing, not counting, “Goodbye, Dean.  And good luck,”) was true enough:  “You have a purpose to fulfill before you can join us in heaven.” 

 

Still, he doesn’t take any chances with the ravening demonically-infected more-or-less-dead, doesn’t sleep out under the blotted-ink sky, either.  For one thing, it’s too depressing, the few lonely stars twinkling desperately against the spreading darkness.

 

For another, there are dragons.

  
Yeah.  That’s what he said the first time he saw them.  Right after, “Holy fuck!”  And right before, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

 

Dragons.  Motherfucking dragons.  In southern Idaho, of all places.

 

Not just for potatoes anymore.

 

Dean snorts, shakes his head free of where his thoughts have wandered, glances at Cindy.  She gives him huge, imploring eyes, and for just a second, as sometimes happens, he’s startled into remembering another set of eyes that could look like that, get him to do stupid and impossible things without ever asking in words.

 

That’s nothing he wants to think about, so he turns up the radio and shouts over it:  “You need to go out?” in the tone of voice guaranteed to get her up.  He could be talking about gas prices—free these days, except for the cost in pumping, which usually involves scything scavengers away from the gas stations with a machete, _Metallica_ blaring from his speakers, but who’s complaining, really?

 

Cindy doesn’t care what he says, so long as he’s talking to her.  Another reason they’ve stayed together so long.

 

Her tail thumps heavily against the door and she heaves herself to her feet.  She’s a big dog, heavy bones, wide skull.  Her tail keeps pretty respectable time with Ulrich’s driving beats.

 

“Okay…”  Eying the road ahead, Dean sees a break in the canyon walls that have been looming over them, shouldering out the sinking sun, for the last several miles.

 

It means they’re pretty close to the reservation.  It also means they’re cattle in the chute if anyone’s looking for easy targets.

 

What he thought was a break in the wall is only a deep crevasse caused by a cave-in eons ago, red rock tumbled carelessly, like some giant’s child left its blocks lying around.

 

It’s probably the best they’re going to get for awhile yet, he thinks, and he could use a stretch of the legs himself.

 

Since Cincinnati—fucking uber-werewolves—his left knee stiffens up if he sits too long in one position without stretching.  He feels like an old man as he hauls himself out of the driver’s seat and straightens up. 

 

Cindy knows the drill and waits on Dean’s seat while he scouts the area, only her avid eyes and the rigidity of her spine indicating her eagerness to be free of the confines of the car.

 

When he senses no immediate danger, he gives a low whistle and Cindy leaps gracefully down onto the gravel shoulder and drops her nose, chasing the scent of some critter or other, until Dean reminds her with a gruff, “Go, already,” what she’s out there to do.

  
He takes the opportunity to relieve himself, as well, and soon enough they’re back on the road.

 

Only when their impromptu rest area is well behind them does Dean loosen his grip on the wheel and stop darting his eyes every few seconds at the rearview mirror.

 

“Not long now, baby. Maybe an hour, hour and a half.” 

 

Cindy sits up for a time, squared up in the seat and staring out the front window for all the world as though she’s enjoying the scenery.

 

And it is pretty in its own way, a different kind of desolation from the wasted cities of the East and Northwest, where the concrete canyons echo with the cries of the infected and the sewer grates sigh out sulfurous steam and spew scalding blood.

 

They pass a rusted brown sign that says something in a strange language, which Dean assumes is meant to welcome them to the Navajo reservation.  Knowing what he’s likely to find—or rather, not find, all things considered—he keeps his eyes fixed on the road, ignoring the burned out “cultural heritage center,” a strip of silver Airstreams stacked on their trailer tongues against each other like the world’s biggest and brightest game of dominoes, the skeletons of horses scattered across the road and crushed to powder under the Impala’s tires.

 

Used to it.  He should be used to it by now, the devastation.  Still, when he’s past what must once have been “civilization,” Navajo-style, Dean lets out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding.  Beside him, Cindy sighs down into a slouch, head once again on her paws but eyes open.

 

She looks worried.

 

He takes one hand off the wheel to pat her on the head.

  
“It’s okay, girl.  We’ll be there soon.”

 

Of course, he isn’t quite sure where “there” is, and there’s a good chance even if he can find it that “there” isn’t there anymore.

 

Or here.

 

Whatever.

 

Still, he’s holding out hope for the Hopis, surrounded as they were on all sides by Navajos, who went down fighting to the last man, as if they could at long last repent of their earlier defeats by valiant but pointless self-sacrifice…maybe the Hopi, anyway, survived it.

 

Or some of them.

 

One, at least.

 

She’s the last chance Dean has, the last of Dad’s contacts.  Every other one has a heavy black pencil hash through it, indicating that he or she is dead, gone, beyond hope, or lost in some other way that equates to about the same thing.

 

Namely that Dean’s on his own.

 

Even Bobby—

 

He won’t let himself go there.  Turning up _Master of Puppets_ until his ears are fairly vibrating with it, until Cindy is whining steadily from the seat beside him, Dean blows out a few hard breaths and tries to look out for the turn-off Dad wrote about in his journal.

 

Three roads on the left after the red rock shaped like God’s anointing hand.

 

He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean.  Used to be Dean could laugh off Dad’s weirder shit.  Now that he knows how much of what Dad said was actually code for the shit that’s been going down since Sam…

 

Since the apocalypse happened, well, he isn’t laughing anymore.

 

Sure enough, there’s a table rock ahead, striated vertically like four fingers, a heavy fault-line making a thumb tight to the “palm,” like a cosmic gesture of blessing.

 

It’s harder to see the roads supposedly running off the one he’s on.  Sand has blown over the broken macadam, and between trying to keep the bouncing Impala from bottoming out and straining to see any signs of a side road, Dean is well on his way to a fiery headache by the time he actually makes out the turn-off.

 

Cursing the worse condition of this road, he muscles the Impala into a hard right, Cindy scrambling a little to keep her seat, and then straightens her out.

 

“Five miles of this and I won’t have any teeth left,” he observes.  Cindy doesn’t answer, but that’s alright.  He knows she understands by the way she’s tensed up trying to keep her own teeth from clacking together.

 

The road ends for good—big red tower rock thrusting up through the earth right where the road used to be—just as the sun is touching down, making monster shadows of the mesa behind him, plunging them all—car, dog, man—into the dark stillness before disaster.

 

Dean tenses, suddenly aware as he wasn’t before of the way the Impala’s engine thunders off the echoing canyon walls, of the loudness of his heart beating in his chest.

 

Hands sweaty on the wheel, he reaches forward slowly to turn the key in the ignition and settle the car down.  Beside him, Cindy whines back in her throat, a deep, frightened sound.

 

Absently, he answers.  “It’s okay, girl.  It’s alright.”

 

It’s not.  This place, the darkness, all of it—if it’s not sanctified ground, they’re dead, no question.  Divine purpose be damned.  There’s no way Dean can survive exposed to the elements like this, not on a night when…

 

In the distance, a wolf howls.

 

A second answers, closer.

  
A third sounds like it’s calling from the roof of the car overhead.

 

Shit.  Full moon.

 

Werewolves were just one of the many perks of the apocalypse, along with demon-virus-infected dead, Satanists and their human sacrifices, and the declaration of martial law that proved much too little far too late.

 

He’d give anything for a simple salt-and-burn.

 

He’s reaching over the seat, half-turned toward the back to get his big gun, fingering over the loose ammo scattered amidst the empty cans and other detritus of living in his car, when the tenor of Cindy’s whines change and he freezes, half afraid to look back toward the tower rock, half resigned.

 

Maybe a little relieved, if he was admitting things to himself these days, which he’s definitely not.

 

He does turn, though, the inevitable feeling of slow motion, the widening of the eyes, the held breath captured in his throat.

 

She doesn’t look all that dangerous.

 

Of course, if there’s anything Dean already knew before the apocalypse, it’s that looks can be deceiving.

 

Still, the petite woman dressed in a loose housedress, face like tanned leather, iron grey hair held back by a beaded band, doesn’t seem especially threatening.

 

She raises a hand, and he finds himself pinned in place, unable to move.  By Cindy’s distressed cries, he knows that she, too, is paralyzed.

 

“We come in peace,” he tries, lamely, internally cursing his utter lack of a plan.  Really, it had been a headlong rush toward sanctuary for so long now that he’s almost forgotten what it was like to have a choice in matters.  Still, if he’d taken the time to think about this, maybe he wouldn’t have snuck up on a Hopi wise woman who was ancient when his father first met her back in 1987.

 

“Dad said she was powerful,” he mutters to himself.

 

There’s a miniscule easing of the tension against his body and he exhales with relief. 

 

“I’m Dean, John Winchester’s son.”

 

He’s not shouting.  The windows are closed, she’s a hundred feet away, and his throat is tight from road dust and fear.

 

But she hears him just fine.

 

The tension eases further, until he can raise his hands in the universal gesture for “I give up.”

 

Cindy settles a little in the seat, her whines less desperate now, more worried.

 

“I need your help.”

 

And like that, like those words are some kind of magic Hopi incantation, he’s free.  He moves cautiously despite his desire to bolt from the car, moves like she might change her mind at any moment, keeps Cindy to her side of the seat with a single gesture.

 

“Good girl,” he whispers, standing and closing the door behind him with deliberation.

 

Hands at his side once more, palms out in a show of peace, Dean waits.

 

She raises her hand, curls her fingers as if to say, “Come,” and turns away, skirting the base of the tower rock with surprising speed for one so apparently old.

 

Dean gives a worried glance back at Cindy, who is watching him, wide brown eyes fixed on Dean.

 

“Bring her.”  The words float back on the wind, the woman already out of sight.  He does as he’s told, opening the door to let Cindy leap out, her mouth open in a happy grin, eyes bright with excitement at their adventure.

 

“C’mon, girl,” he says, patting his thigh.  She falls in beside him, tail wagging like a metronome.

 

Rounding the rock, he’s surprised yet again to find an adobe home, squat and round, taking up most of the space between two encroaching canyon walls.  Beyond it, a dark crevasse hints at a further passage, but it’s too dark to tell for sure if the arroyo is blind or not.

 

Discomforted by the feeling of being hemmed in, Dean shrugs his shoulders, trying to shake off a sensation of being watched.

 

“They won’t hurt you,” he hears from within the little house.

 

He’s about to ask who “They” are when he hears Cindy’s low, warning growl.  Following the dog’s rigid posture with his eyes, he sees what she does:  crows, the biggest fucking crows he’s ever seen, landing with their oddly graceful hops at the top of the arroyo walls all around them.

 

They are silent despite their numbers, and it makes Dean’s heart leap and flutter in his chest.

 

“They’re sentinels,” she explains, and he’s starting to wonder if he hasn’t wandered into some alternate universe Stephen King novel, _The Stand, Part Two_ , or something.

 

“Come in.  It will be cold soon.  And you’re hungry.”

 

As if on cue, his stomach growls and Cindy gives a high yip, her begging-at-table bark.  Dean had almost forgotten what it sounds like; they don’t have the luxury of scraps very often, and she has to be content to eat what he can manage to spare.

 

Hesitantly, scouting the interior as he goes, Dean steps inside to find a neatly swept dirt floor, simple table, two chairs, clay hearth taking up most of one rounded wall and lending warmth and light to the interior.  The inside of the hut smells of bread baking, and saliva floods his mouth.

 

He has to bite his tongue to keep from embarrassing himself by moaning.

 

The old woman chuckles as if she knows what he’s feeling.

 

“Welcome to my home, Dean Winchester.  I’m Sari. Sit,” she says peremptorily, gesturing toward one of the two chairs.  Already there’s a tin plate, fork, enameled cup at the spot.

 

“She can have hers by the hearth,” the woman adds.  She produces a pottery bowl from a freestanding wooden cupboard.

 

Beside the cupboard is a sink stand and fastened to its side an old-fashioned pump, its pipe sweating in the heat of the room.

 

Seeing him looking, the woman nods and smiles.  “Fresh water.”

 

This time, Dean does groan.

 

“There’s no shower,” she warns, “But I’ve got a tub out back by the big pump.  If you don’t mind doing the work, you can have a bath in the morning.

 

Wondering if it’s possible to have died and gone to heaven without noticing it, Dean closes his eyes against the sudden prickle of tears. 

 

She pats his hand and he startles, not having heard her move.

 

“Eat,” she orders, spooning a huge helping of something spicy and hot onto his plate.

 

He doesn’t ask what it is, doesn’t pause even long enough to thank her, just digs in with his fork and shovels the food into his mouth.  The first few gulps he doesn’t taste at all.  Only when a disapproving “tsk” catches his attention does he pause and look up.

 

She’s standing beside her seat, a much smaller portion of food steaming on her waiting plate.  Her eyes are on him, her mouth downturned.

 

“Sorry,” he mutters through a mouthful, swallowing and sitting back, putting his fork down with visible reluctance.

 

She sits, folds her hands, says a few words in what he assumes is Hopi over her food. 

When she looks up again and gives him a little nod to continue, he tries to be slower and less animal-like in his eating.

 

Only then does he notice behind her Cindy, her muzzle buried in the pottery bowl, mouth working rhythmically over its savory contents.

 

“Thank you,” he says then, but he has to clear his throat, both for the unfamiliar spices zinging up the back of his nose and the tightness her generosity has put there.

 

“You’re welcome, Dean.”

 

He eats at a more sedate pace, then, enjoying the strange flavors, the way the meat—he doesn’t think too hard about what it could be—grinds between his teeth, the way the beans burst and spread further flavor over his tongue.  He notices his cup, then, sweating in the warmth of the room, takes a cautious sip, tries to keep from an undignified noise as the sweetness of the cold water pours down his throat.

 

“It’s good,” he manages, though his heart is again constricting his voice.  “Really good.”

 

She nods, eyes crinkling at the corners, pushes a bread basket toward him.

 

Inside a blue checkered cloth, he finds flatbread still warm from the hearth, corn flour making his fingers dusty.  He rolls it, dips it in the sauce of his meal as he sees her doing, bites into it, makes a noise.

 

She chuckles.

 

When the simple meal is done—he’s had three helpings of the meat, beans, and gravy, and four rounds of flatbread—he pushes away from the table with a logy fullness he hasn’t felt in years and struggles to his feet, his left knee twinging in protest.

 

“I’ll do the dishes,” he offers, suiting actions to words and clearing his place.  By the fire, Cindy is sound asleep, curled near the heat of the bread stone, breath heavy with contentment.

 

The woman gets up, too, and takes her dishes to the sink, shows him the scouring stone, retrieves a wooden drying rack, which she places on a piece of toweling on the table.

 

He works happily over the dishes for a little time, staring out the adobe home’s only window at the dark wall of the canyon rising up not ten feet away from him.  It’s such a domestic task, one he never got to do much of when he and Sam were—

 

Dragging his mind off that track, he turns to her, leaning against the sink stand, clears his throat and says, “So, how well did you know my dad?”

 

Sari, who is sitting in her chair at the table once more and smoking a long, clay pipe, gives a rusty laugh and says, “No one knew your father very well.  He was a good man, but secretive, always afraid someone would discover the truth before he did.  Every time he visited me, he made my skin itch.  I liked your father, but I was always happy to see the back of him.”

 

Dean gives a rueful laugh.  “Yeah, he had that effect on people, I guess.”

 

“You’ve come because of the prophecy.”

 

She says it like there couldn’t be any other reason, and of course, there isn’t.  Life has been reduced to a series of desperate gambits designed to keep him alive just a little longer, at least until he can know—

 

“You’re a lot like him, Dean.  You don’t admit it to yourself, but it’s true.”

 

Dean nods.  There’s not much pride left in him to argue with her. 

“Your father always said you were stronger than he was.  He was right.”

 

Dean doesn’t feel strong.  He feels stretched thin, too much time over too long a distance.  Lonely, though he won’t admit it, and tired, trying hard to remember he has a reason to keep going.

 

“He knew you would come here.”

 

Dean gives her a sharp look, mind focused at once on the moment, not the past rising up to throttle him like it often does.

 

“He knew what would happen to Samuel, too.”

 

Dean clears his throat again, wishing at once that he hadn’t come.  He doesn’t want to talk about Sam, doesn’t want to remember—

 

“It’s not your fault.”

 

He gives a humorless laugh, shifts away from where he leans, starts to pace the narrow interior of the little hut.

 

“But you don’t want an old woman telling you that.  It’s nothing you’ll hear from me or anyone.  Guess you’d like me to get on with it.”

 

He doesn’t want to be rude, but the woman’s right.  He’s not interested in talking about his family or the past or any other damned thing but the next one, what’s coming, where he’s supposed to be headed now.

 

“The end will come in the west, in a place guarded by chaos’ children.”

 

Even though she’s still sitting where she had been, still clutching the clay pipe in her crone’s hand, it’s as though she’s been transformed, like the meager light of the hearth fire has gathered in a nimbus around her and the rest of the room has grown dark with ominous shadows.

 

Dean can’t help the shiver that wracks him.  To keep from showing his sudden fear, he sits at the table across from her, his breath shallow, eyes a little wide.

 

Cindy, though, sleeps on undisturbed, and this more than anything else calms him.

 

“California, I think,” she says, her voice normal, the light in the room once again ordinary.

 

“Chaos’ children?” he asks, wondering for the millionth time why prophecies always have to be couched in stupid riddles.

 

She shakes her head, a frown creasing the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth.  Closing her eyes, she plucks at the air with the fingers not holding the pipe, as though picking images out that only she can see.

 

"One among them will know you.”

 

Opening her eyes, shaking her head, she takes a deep draw of the pipe.  Sweet smoke plumes around her head.

 

“Know me how?  You mean, like from before?”

 

She shakes her head again, sets down her pipe, makes a bowl of her two open palms, like she’s cupping unseen things in her hands.

 

He watches as she scries the spaces between her fingers and the deep lines of her wrinkled palms.

 

“I’m sorry.  That’s all I know.  He’ll know you.”

 

Something about the way she repeats the word “know” catches his attention, and it occurs to Dean that maybe she means biblically.  A sharp glance pries no further meaning from her neutral expression, however, and he abandons that line of thought. 

 

“Well, it’s a start.  Any idea where in California?”

 

Sari shrugs, and it’s such an ordinary gesture that Dean can’t help but smile a little.

 

“North, I think,” she adds eventually.  “Head north.”

 

“Great.”

 

He’s weary already with it, thinking about the hundreds of miles of road, no sanctuary to be found.

 

“There’s a shepherd’s church in Barstow,” Sari says, and Dean is once again convinced that she can read his mind.  “You’ll find sanctuary there.”

 

He nods.  Barstow’s about seven hours away, barring disaster.  That’s doable.  And maybe in Barstow he can find some answers about these so-called children of chaos.

 

“You need to rest,” she says.  “You’ll want to be up early if you hope to have a bath before you hit the road.”

 

A zing of pleasure thrills through him then—he’d forgotten all about the tub out back!—and for a second he feels his own age again, having something simple to look forward to.

 

“You can sleep here.”  She gets up, gestures toward the floor in front of the hearth, where Cindy is already taking up a good deal of space.  “I have a cot.”

 

She moves toward a screen that blocks off a portion of the hut from the rest.  He follows her at a gesture, and behind it finds a bed, a fruit crate nightstand, a kerosene lantern, a line of clothes hung neatly from screen to a bracket on the wall.

 

He helps her wrestle a folding cot out from under her low frame bed, carries it back out to the hearth, Sari following with an armful of brightly colored, hand-woven blankets and a pillow that she’d produced from a trunk at the end of the bed.

 

“I’ll only be a few moments,” she says before disappearing out the front door.  “Outhouse is around back,” she adds, her voice carrying through the window over the sink. 

 

The sound of a squeaky pump and the gushing of water signals her business outside, and Dean takes his time setting up the cot, arranging the blankets and pillows, trying not to grin over the luxury of sleeping somewhere other than his car.  He really is kind of pathetic about creature comforts these days.

 

When she returns, Sari pauses at the screen, intones, “Sleep in peace,” almost formally, and then retires.

 

Dean nods his answer and goes outside to splash water on his face and relieve himself. He makes a point of not looking skyward, knowing that he’ll see nothing good there, not wanting a reminder just then of how much has already been lost to this world.  Still, with it sitting bloated and half-eaten on the horizon, the remainder of the moon can’t be avoided, and he feels like he’s being watched by something malevolent.

 

That feeling grows when he hears the howling of werewolves from the canyons around them.  It seems to funnel into the arroyo and bounce around, growing louder and closer with every baying call.  The sentinel crows are silent, though, so he guesses the wolves aren’t really as close as they seem.

 

Nevertheless, he hurries to be done with his business outside.

 

Once back in the hut and out of his jeans and long sleeved shirt, despite his tiredness, Dean finds that he cannot quite sleep.  The cot is comfortable enough—lavish, really, all things considered—and Cindy’s steady snores are likewise comforting.  But his mind won’t let him rest, turning over again and again the old woman’s words, wondering what the prophecy means, what he’s going to find when he gets to California.  Skittering over his brother’s fate, over Sam’s face that last time…

 

Finally, though, nature gets the better of neuroses, dragging him down into the dark oblivion of sleep.

 

If he dreams, he’s blessed with forgetfulness, and when he wakes to the smell of sweetbread and the sound of Sari singing at the table, he wonders once more if it’s possible he’s died without knowing it.

 

Cindy, at eye level with his low cot, laps his face once, twice, and from her breath Dean knows he’s not in heaven. 

 

“Good morning,” Sari says, interrupting her singing to greet him.

 

“Morning.”

 

“There’s coffee by the hearth.”

 

He turns his head the other way on the pillow to see an antique, enameled kettle steaming just beyond the wide, round mouth of the bread oven door. 

 

“You have coffee?”  There might be tears in his voice, but Dean doesn’t care.  It’s been years since he had—

 

“Chicory, actually, but it’s got a bit of a kick to it.”

 

Tamping down rabid disappointment, Dean swings his legs over the side of the cot, stands, lets his left leg negotiate his weight, and then shambles toward the door.  “Need anything from out back?”

 

“Throw some more wood on the fire,” she answers, not looking up from where she’s mixing something in a ceramic bowl.

 

When he rounds the rear of the little house, he sees a wood fire burning beneath a metal tripod, in the center of which is suspended a pot-bellied cast iron cauldron. 

 

Water for his bath, he assumes.  A glance inside the cauldron assures him that it is, indeed, water, and not some more occult content.  From a neatly stacked pile of split wood—and this raises his eyebrow for sure because there isn’t a single tree within sight, so where does her wood come from?—he takes some fuel and tosses it into the fire before going about his morning necessities.

 

It’s early morning yet, the sky over the arroyo rim just starting to pinken.  There are no birds singing, a silence he’s grown accustomed to, but something skitters in the undergrowth behind the outhouse, and it cheers him, like he’s not quite so alone.

 

“People might think you’re a witch, they catch sight of that cauldron,” he suggests, smile in his voice as he enters the hut again.

 

“No people but my own to worry over,” she answers, still stirring the contents of her bowl.

 

“How many?” He asks, before considering that it’s a rude question these days, one that can’t have a happy answer.

  
But she takes it in stride, like the apocalypse hasn’t happened to her, or like if it did, it hasn’t hurt her the same way.

 

“Same as usual, I guess, minus the young men and a few old fools who went off to fight with the Navajo against the end times.”

 

So maybe not like the apocalypse hasn’t happened, but rather like it didn’t happen quite the same way for the Hopi.

 

“We tried to tell them there was no sense to fighting it, but they wouldn’t listen.”  She tsks over her work, shakes her grey head.  “Fools.”  She says it fondly, though, and there’s a sadness there Dean’s heard so often he sometimes thinks it’s the only color words have anymore.

 

“Water will be ready soon.  Sit down and eat before your bath.  I expect you’ll want to be on the road before long.”

 

His heart squeezes a little at the idea of leaving this peaceful place, but he knows he can’t stay.  Still, he tries to enjoy the sweetbread, still warm from the oven, and the jerky and dried berries she gives him.  He doesn’t ask what the jerky’s made of, and she doesn’t offer.  Just as well.

 

Dean makes quick work of his meal, deciding he needs to get the leavetaking over with.  Motioning to Cindy, he heads out to the Impala to dig up the cleanest clothes he can find and then returns to the back yard of Sari’s house, hearing her call to him as he passes the kitchen window, “There’s a towel on the line.”

 

Sure enough, when he looks to the opposite side of the hut, he finds a clothesline stretching from the eaves to a lightning blasted pine several yards away.  Crisp white towels hang dry and stiff in the utter absence of a breeze.

 

He takes one, grateful for their clean smell and the feel of the fabric against the roughness of his callused hands.  He resists rubbing it against his cheek, knowing that he needs a shave and that his face is none too clean, either.

 

Using a bucket to scoop out the cauldron, he fills the tin tub partway, pumps some cold water to balance out the boiling hot temperature of it, and then strips quickly, not so much out of modesty as out of an eagerness to be in the steaming tub.

 

He won’t be able to stretch out, will have to sit with his knees practically to his chin, in fact, but he doesn’t care.  Just the idea of being semi-immersed in warm water raises goosebumps along his arms.

 

It’s just as heavenly as he’d imagined.  The soap smells of nothing so much as desert flowers, and he wonders how Sari makes it, what she uses for fat and lye.  He doesn’t spend much time contemplating it, though, for the feel of hot water and suds in all the secret places of his body almost makes him cry.

 

“You’re getting soft, Winchester,” he tells himself.  Cindy barks her agreement.

 

“Shut up,” he answers, flicking water at her.  She tries to snap a soap bubble in her teeth, mouth wide in her manic grin, and he laughs and splashes some more at her.

 

She dances around him, nipping playfully at the rim of the tub, and he’s almost overcome for a second by the sight of her simple, doggy joy.

 

When he’s finally rinsed and clean, he takes a bucket of warm water and the soap out to the Impala, picks a mostly good disposable razor out of his diddy bag in the trunk, and shaves away the three-day growth of beard that had been dirtying up his jawline.

 

Refreshed, he jogs back around the tower rock and takes care of emptying the tub and cleaning it of soap scum.

 

He hangs his towel at a careful distance from the clean ones still on the line, grimacing at how dirty he’s gotten it.

 

Cindy trots behind him all the way back.

 

Back inside, Sari greets him with a basket covered in a checked cloth.  “Some provisions for your journey,” she explains, holding it out to him.

 

“I won’t be able to bring it back.”  He doesn’t know why it seems important to say that.  She’s obviously offering him a gift.  His denial is rude, really.  But…

 

“I’ll take my chances,” she says, smiling.  “Take it.”

 

“Thank you,” he says, humbled again by her generosity, feeling again his heart catching in his throat.  “I was wondering if I could ask a favor.  I know you’ve already done a lot for me and my family, but…”

 

“I’d love to keep Cindy here with me.  It’ll be nice to have a companion.  And I can afford to feed her, so don’t worry your mind over it.”

 

Dean chuffs out a laugh, shakes his head ruefully.  “You really are a mind-reader.”

 

“No, Dean.  You’re just easy to read, that’s all.”

  
Sari touches his cheek with her withered palm and goes up on tiptoes to give him a kiss there, too.

 

“Be safe in your travels, young man.”

 

“I will.  And thank you again, Sari.  I wish I could repay you somehow.”

 

“I think saving the world will be payment enough.”

 

Dean wonders what she knows that he doesn’t, but from the twinkle in her eyes, he suspects she won’t be giving him anything else, so he turns to Cindy and crouches down, ruffling the thick fur around her collar and letting her lick his face.

 

“You be good for Sari, now, girl.  Don’t go eating her out of house and home.”

 

As though the dog knows Dean’s intentions, she whines and drops her head, snuffling at his boots as though begging him to take her along.

 

“You’ll be safer here, girl.  And Sari needs you.”

 

The dog drops to her belly, drops her chin to her paws and looks up at him in a way that is so utterly familiar he has to turn away.

 

Sari says something in Hopi to his retreating back, but it’s only when he’s almost out of sight around the base of the tower rock that he stops long enough to look back.  The little old woman stands in her doorway, one hand on Cindy’s head.  Four eyes are fixed on him.

  
He raises his hand in farewell and steps out of sight.

 

A sharp bark follows him to the car.

 

Once in the Impala, gas tank topped from the cans in back, engine idling smoothly, Dean lets out a shaking breath and drops his forehead onto his hands atop the wheel.  Then he puts her in reverse and starts the complicated twelve-point turn it takes him to get her facing in the right direction.

 

The road back to what passes for a highway is just as brutal as he remembers it being, and by the time he makes it onto the arguably smoother, though still rutted macadam, he has a headache blooming behind his eyes.  Sighing over the seven hours he’s got ahead of him—and that’s assuming he doesn’t meet with any roadblocks, real or metaphoric—he pops in a tape and peeks under the cover of the basket Sari had given him.

 

Sweetbread.  Muffins.  Sandwiches.  Jerky.  And a stoppered clay bottle of something he hopes against hope is moonshine, Hopi-style. 

 

Settling back in his seat, Dean fixes his eyes on the western sky and puts the pedal down.

 

***** 

 

 _Sacrifice is often required of those who have the most to lose and the least compunction to let go of it.  Nevertheless, the good man will let go when he has to, knowing that those he leaves behind will learn to live without him, even if they never exactly understand why he made the choices he did.  This is the sorrow every mother carries who has lost a son or brother or husband.  Always, it’s the women we ask this of:  that they stay behind and remember what we ourselves are destined to forget, namely family, home, love, and a life that doesn’t make killing and dying its twin pillars._   (Book of Johns 6: 26-30)

 

Jax is elbows-deep in the engine of an old-school Jeep 4x4, cursing a steady stream as he tries to wrestle out the carburetor, when he hears the telltale rumble of Bobby’s bike and shortly after it Chibs’ and Juices’.  He lets out a breath, quits his cursing, and comes up for air, wiping grease off his arms and moving deliberately toward the yard.

 

He can’t see any bloodstains from where he is.  No one seems to be tied to his seat, either.  Juice’s bike is missing its iPod holder, he notes, but otherwise, they seem more or less intact.

 

“Alright?” he asks as Bobby dismounts slowly, his age and weight making themselves felt.  Juice is already three steps towards the clubhouse, waving a reassuring hand over his shoulder as he breaks into a trot.

 

“Aye, we’re good,” Chibs answers.  Bobby grunts and rakes his helmet-flattened hair back off of his face.

 

“Bobby?”

 

“Yeah, we’re fine.” 

 

But he sounds pissed, and he sees Chibs dart a glance in their direction before he, too, heads for the clubhouse.

 

“What happened?”

 

“Nothing.”  It’s short, sharp, and Bobby turns away, giving Jax his back.

 

“Bobby—“

 

“It was just a hard ride is all.  We saw some shit.  Some bad shit.”

 

And then he understands, lets the man go, breathes out a little sigh that no one hears before turning back toward the garage and the bitch of a Jeep.  If they didn’t need the fucking gas hog for hauling, he’d take it out to the road and blow it the fuck up.

 

As it is, though, it’s the best they’ve got.

 

As he works, he thinks about what it is the guys might have seen.  “Bad shit” covers a lot of ground for the Sons, especially since the apparent end of the world started going down.

 

Rivers of blood and plagues of locusts, fine.  But lightning out of a clear blue sky, a third of the first boys of every family dying, people going crazy and beating their families to death before trying to eat them?

 

Yeah, that’s some fucked up shit.

 

He sighs again, swears as the wrench slips and he slices the side of his hand on the sheared bolt.

  
“FUCK!” he screams, hearing it dull and flatten on the hood overhead.

 

“Let me see,” she says, and Jax jumps, narrowly missing crowning himself against the hood prop.

 

“Jesus, mom!  Warn a guy next time, would you?”

 

“You’re bleeding,” Gemma says, reaching a hand toward his begrimed, bloody own.

 

“It’s nothing.  I’ll go clean it up.”

 

“Let me help.”

 

“Mom.” It’s gentle, but there’s warning in it, too.  These days, it’s all Jax can do not to yell at her.  It’s not her fault, of course, none of it.  She can’t help it, and that makes him a little sick.  “Go back to the office.”

 

“Alright, honey.  Call me if you need me.”  And for the briefest span of seconds as her voice dies away, Jax hears his mother as she once was, before it all went to hell.  Before Clay died bloody.  Before Tig’s “accident.”  Before Charming became an embattled last stand against shit that just shouldn’t be.

 

As he passes through the clubhouse, he avoids looking at Tig, who is in his usual spot on the couch beneath the embroidered SoA banner.  From the back, Jax can hear a shower going, probably Juice.  Bobby’s in his room brooding, if the low sound of Elvis’ darker moments is any clue, and it usually is.  Chibs is nowhere to be seen, but Jax is sure he’s got a bottle with him, wherever he is. 

 

Tig’s broken voice carries across to him as he reaches the hall that leads to the head.

 

“Mother of Sorrows,” says their former Enforcer. 

 

“Shut up,” he mutters, but he doesn’t mean it.  Tig can’t help it, either. 

 

There’s a lot of helplessness going around.

 

“You want me to finish up with the Jeep?”

 

Ope comes from his room in the back, nods at Jax’s hand.

 

“Yeah, thanks, Ope.  The guys are back.”

 

Ope nods.  “I heard.  How was it?”

 

Jax shakes his head.  “Bobby said it was bad.”

 

Ope’s mouth thins, turns down at the corners.  He’s seen worse than most of them.  It’s on his face, in his eyes.  His son had been a first son, after all.  Like Ope himself.  Like Jax, too. But somehow that hadn’t factored in.  The rules don’t make any fucking sense at all.

 

“I’ll talk to ‘em.”

 

“Thanks.”  Jax shakes his head again once he’s safely behind the thin door of the bathroom, water running to disguise his sigh.  Time was, Ope didn’t talk about shit with anyone.

 

Course, that was before, too.

 

Jax thinks, not for the first time, that maybe they should start a new calendar just to make things simple.  BE, before the end, and AE, after.

 

He’d never given the apocalypse much thought, but he guesses he’d figured it would be the End End.  Like, that’s all she wrote.  Sayonara.  Kiss your ass goodbye.

 

This lingering thing sucks.

 

Hissing through his clenched teeth, he cleans with pumice soap to clear his hands of grease before examining the gash.  It’s not too bad, probably take a couple of butterfly stitches and a bandage.

 

It’s gonna make things harder to do for the next few days, though, being his right hand and all.

 

He sighs again—bad habit, he tells himself—and pulls the first aid kit down from the medicine cabinet.  The red cross on its cover reminds him of hospitals, which inevitably leads to thoughts of Tara.  He lost touch with her when things really went to shit.

 

As far as he knows, she’d been in Chicago, working on her residency.  He knows better than to hope she made it out of the city alive, knows what the big cities were like in the days following the so-called “demon virus” that swept through them.

 

Still, he holds out hope.  It’s stupid, but it doesn’t hurt anything, so why not?  Why the fuck not?

 

“You okay?”

 

Mom again.  Through the closed door, her voice sounds normal, and he closes his eyes to blot out his expression reflected back at him in the medicine cabinet mirror.  He’s tired of seeing on his face the echoes of her impossible pain.

 

“I’m fine, Mom.  It’s nothing.”

 

It’s awkward trying to get the butterfly bandages on, trying to gauze and tape his right hand using his left, but he manages with a minimum of cursing, and when he emerges a few minutes later, it’s to find Gemma sitting beside Tig on the sofa, his hand in hers, their eyes closed, lips murmuring unintelligible things.

 

“Great,” he says under his breath. 

 

From his usual stool by the bar, Piney wheezes.  “Leave ‘em alone.  Prayers can’t hurt anything.”

 

“It’s not the prayin’ that concerns me, old man.  It’s the way she always is after.”

 

Piney nods, his lined face growing more wrinkled with a frown of understanding. 

 

They’d all taken for granted that Gemma would always shoulder the weight of the world.  No one, not even Jax, ever considered what carrying it would do to her.

 

He guesses it’s probably better that she’s like this now, though.  She doesn’t really know what’s happening beyond the yard, confined as she is to the garage and the clubhouse.  The three surviving girls take turns keeping an eye on her, and it’s not like she’s a complete invalid.

 

There are days she’s almost normal.  Those are the hardest on him.  He lets himself forget, sometimes, what’s happened to her, lets himself pretend that nothing’s changed.  He knows better, knows it’s not good for him, knows that after, when she slides back into the sorrow, he’ll hate himself, her, the world all the more for those illusions.

 

Still, he can’t seem to stop hoping there, either.

 

Reluctantly, Jax calls, “Ope,” knowing the big man will bring the others from wherever they’re lurking.  He has to take a deep breath before crossing the threshold into the room they used to call “church,” before the holy thing started to mean more, before Clay…

 

Well, yeah.  Before it all went to shit.

 

He doesn’t sit in Clay’s chair, even if he is the president.  He only put on the patch ‘cause Bobby said he had to, said it would be good for morale, show that the Sons still had a leader.  Most days, Jax doesn’t feel like he’s leading anything.

 

He can’t believe this is what he wanted so badly once upon a time.

 

Chibs comes through first, pushing a wave of scotch ahead of him with every breath.  Juice follows, skin still damp, glowing with the heat of the shower.  Bobby comes more slowly, hesitates at the door.  Jax knows what Bobby sees every time he enters the room:  the bloodstain in the Reaper carved in the wood of the table.  No amount of cleaning would get it out. 

 

Gemma tried scrubbing it until her fingers were raw, until her own blood mingled, making it worse. 

  
Jax had had to pull her off bodily.

 

Ope is last, sliding the door to behind him.

 

Jax gives him an eyebrow.

 

“Tig’s still in it with Gemma. Sounds like Greek or something.  Didn’t figure you’d want me to interrupt him.  Piney says he’ll take a pass.  Doesn’t want to know.  The kid is at the hospital helping out.”

 

Jax’s face suddenly feels tight, but he pulls his lips away from his teeth and says, “Report.”

 

Bobby just shakes his head when Chibs and Juice look to him.

 

Chibs’ eyes are glassy, already losing focus.  No liquor in church, of course, but he’s already stewed, sweating it.  It stinks up the whole goddamn room.

 

Juice looks sheepishly at his brothers and then tries on a nervous smile.  “It was bad, Jax.  Real bad.”

 

“Bad how?”

 

He doesn’t want to know, not at all, but he has to ask, has to keep a record.  It’s the only way they can figure out a pattern.  Gotta keep one step ahead of this bitch if they can.

 

He’s fooling himself. He knows it.  They all do.  But he keeps up the pretense, the shit about posterity, because otherwise, what will they do?

 

“We didn’t get to Barstow.”

 

Jax hadn’t figured they would—too far, too much unknown between here and there.  Still, something Tig had said…

 

“Got stopped just outside of Lathrop.  Roadblock,” and by his tone, Jax knows Juice means the usual:  jackknifed trailers side by side, making a narrow alley between them to ride through. 

 

Ambush time.

 

“So we turn off, right, into this, like, housing development.  All the houses the same, creepy.  Kind of like that movie, you know, where all the people act like robots and shit?”

 

Jax resists barking at Juice to keep going, knows it the kid’s defense against what comes next.

 

“Usually, you figure one, two hives of zombies, right?”

 

They’d learned the hard way that the infected dead tended to congregate in city centers.

 

"And then we hear it.”

 

From the paleness of Bobby’s face and the way Chibs is clutching the edge of the table, Jax knows the men are hearing it again.

 

“Screams, I guess.  But not fresh.  Like they’d been at it awhile, you know?  Like their voices really couldn’t do it anymore.”

 

Juice’s voice has trailed off until he’s practically whispering, some sort of delayed sympathy or maybe just the result of his frayed control taking hold of his windpipe.

 

“Bobby said we had to check it out.” There’s accusation there, and the older man flinches as Jax’s eyes stray to him, but he has no blame to lay on the man.  They need to know, even when it’s awful, which it usually is.

 

“So we go up to this big house.  Front door’s open, living room’s empty, kitchen.  We don’t hear nothin’ from upstairs, so we keep going through the house and out into the back.

 

Which is when we see the family who must’ve lived there.  They’re out on the deck in the backyard, in lawn chairs like they were caught catchin’ a few rays or somethin’.  But they’re the ones makin’ the noise.  And these huge…things…these monsters—like fuckin’ dragons, man, or horseflies on steroids or something, I don’t even know, it was fucked up, man….”

 

Jax says, “Take it easy, Juice.  Just tell us what was happening.”

 

“They were stabbing these people with their…stingers, or somethin’.  I don’t even know what it was, Jax.  They just kept stabbin’ the people, and the people—it was, like, a father and mother and two kids, two little kids.  Two boys.  One of ‘em couldn’t have been more than five years old, man…”

 

Juice sucks in a wet breath, and Jax—none of them—blame him for the tears sliding down his face.  Ope’s got his hands curled in fists on the tabletop.  Bobby is half-turned away like he might bolt from the room altogether.  Chibs’ eyes are pooled with tears.

 

“They wouldn’t die.  There was blood—so much blood—but they weren’t dying.  Their eyes were open, and they could see me—us.  The mother looked like she was saying, ‘Please, please.’  The kids were crying.  The father was, like, convulsing in his chair, foaming at the mouth, kicking.

 

So we shot ‘em.  All of ‘em.  One bullet each, right between the eyes.

 

Then we slammed the sliding glass door on those fucking monsters and ran like hell.  Made it to our bikes and got the fuck outta there.  They chased us.  We could hear ‘em getting closer, like fucking chopper blades inches from our heads, man.  I threw my iPod dock at one of ‘em.  Chibs shot one. 

 

We got away and came back here.”

 

When Juice finishes, he’s sucking in gusting breaths, like he can’t get enough air or he’s still riding for his life.  Jax scans the faces of the other two, Chibs’ unseeing eyes, Bobby’s shuttered and facing away.

 

“That about it?”

 

Ope makes a noise of disapproval in his throat, but Jax can’t give a fuck what his VP thinks about him right then.  He’s got to know all of it.

 

“Yeah, that’s it.”  Bobby’s voice is caustic, and Jax nods, mostly to himself, acknowledging the man’s right to hate him.

 

“I’ll run it by Tig.”

 

“Great.  Ask the loony tune.  I’m sure that’ll be real helpful.”

 

Chibs slurs something that might be, “Fuck,” but no one’s really sure.

 

“Thanks, guys.  Get some rest.”

 

It’s laughable how pathetic his words are, how much they fail to mean to anyone.  But it’s all he’s got. 

 

Out in the clubhouse proper, Tig sits alone once more.  Jax looks to Piney, who says, “Kerry took her back to the office.”

 

Sighing at small blessings—fuck knows there aren’t any large ones left—Jax pulls a chair from the rec room, straddles it backwards, and faces Tig from a few feet away.

 

He’s quiet for awhile, waiting.  The man knows who he is, what he wants.  Blindness hasn’t made Tig any less observant.

 

“Give it to me,” Tig says at last.  His voice has the blasted quality of bare skin dragged under hot metal along a gravel shoulder.

 

Appropriate, given the way Tig got blind.

 

“Horseflies from hell stinging people who can’t die.”

 

Like a switch flipping, Tig’s wrecked voice is replaced with a deeper resonance.  His milky eyes seem to brighten from behind, though Jax is sure that’s his imagination working overtime.  It’s not like Tig’s not creepy all on his own these days.

 

_And their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings a man. And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death will fly from them._

Jax waits some more until Tig is back to himself.

 

“Basically, there are these super bugs that bite you until you want to die but you won’t.  It’s the plague of the fifth angel.  He opens the gates of hell and these fuckers fly out.”

 

“You got anything else for me, Tig?”

 

“Why you askin’, kid?”  
  


“You were over here with Gemma for awhile.”

 

Tig’s face softens a little.  “We were just prayin’.”

 

Jax snorts.  Even as long as it’s been, he has trouble hearing words like that from Tig, prophet or no prophet.

 

“Hey, you figure out a way to put me on a bike, I’ll be out there raising some hell myself.  You know that.”

 

“Yeah.”  There’s regret and fondness in Jax’s voice, and something else, some note neither acknowledges.

 

“Ope says it was in Greek.”

 

Tig’s face shifts, turning stony, unreadable.  “Yeah?”

 

Jax won’t push.  He learned a long time ago that Tig gives up the new words only when he’s ready.  Until then, nothing but God’s own hand will get him to talk.  And sometimes not even that.

 

He leans forward slowly, telegraphing the movement, and then pats Tig’s knee.  “Thanks.”

 

“Yeah, sure, kid.  What else am I good for?” 

 

Tig’s face turns down on one side.  The other is an immobile mess of scars, pocked with road grit they’d never been able to clean out.

 

“We need you,” Jax adds, pushing up from the chair.

 

Tig waves him off, closes his blasted eyes, lets his head fall back on the couch.  “I’m taking a nap.”

 

Jax puts his chair back and considers his next move. 

 

“Have a drink, boy.”

 

Piney’s holding a bottle an inch above the bar.  The amber liquid shakes with the tremors in his hand.  Further down the bar, Chibs is hunched over his own bottle, staring down a darkness Jax can’t take away.

 

Jax sighs to himself, puts on a half-smile, shakes his head.  “Got some shit to do.  ‘sides, patrol’s in an hour.”

 

Piney waves the empty hand in a dismissive gesture, as if to say, “Suit yourself,” and turns toward Chibs.

 

Jax heads for the garage, figuring to help Ope finish the Jeep.

 

When he gets there, he sees she’s already off the lift, sitting outside, nose-in against the fence near their bikes.

 

Ope’s coming out of the office, wiping his hands clear with a shop rag.

 

“Gemma needs to see you.”

 

“Shit.”  It’s not loud enough for Ope to hear, though.  “Yeah, alright.”

 

As he passes Ope, he says, “You ridin’ with me on patrol?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“You seein’ Ellie tonight?”  Ope’s daughter gets shuttled from girl to girl, since Donna’s death at the hands of the thing that came for Kenny.

 

Ope’s face goes blank in that way he has of saying, “Leave me the fuck alone,” without a word.

 

Jax pushes.  “How long’s it been since Ellie saw her dad?”

 

“Leave it,” Ope warns, fists flexing.

 

Deciding Ope’s one immovable object he isn’t going to budge, Jax steps around his glowering friend and heads for the office, bracing himself mentally for a different kind of confrontation.

 

Gemma looks up from the file she’s paging through on the desk.

 

“You seen the monthly reports?  This is bullshit, Jax.  The books are a mess.”

 

Closing the file folder and taking it from her, Jax says, “It’s okay, Mom.  I’ll get Bobby to look it over later.  Why don’t you get Kerry to drive you home?”

 

They’d had to hide all the car keys from her months ago, when she’d disappeared for hours and come back covered in blood, a gouge down the hood of her Lincoln and strange, iridescent skin caught in her grill.  She’d been grinning ear to ear, whooping as she’d torn into the lot, and for a split second Jax’s relief had turned to joy, thinking maybe Gemma was back.

 

The next morning had been worse than ever, though, her asking for Clay every five minutes and finally getting so wild that Jax had had to stick her with a needle full of tranquilizer just to get her to settle down.

 

“Are you coming for dinner?”

 

He nods, not really meaning it.  Chances are, she won’t remember she asked him.  Won’t remember she doesn’t go home anymore, lives at the clubhouse like all of them do now.  He humors her.  “After patrol.”

 

“Okay, dear.”  She pecks him on the cheek, and he tries not to grimace at the absence of understanding in her eyes.

 

As she’s going out, she stops, looks back over her shoulder, and says, “It’s going to be okay, Jax.  You have to trust him.”

 

Something about her posture, about the way her lips move around the sounds, makes him push away from the desk and stand up straight.

 

“Who, Mom?  Who do you mean?”

 

“He’s another son of John.”

 

For a second, the air trembles a little around his eyes, and his stomach swoops and flips.  “Who?” he whispers, suddenly afraid.

 

“You’ll know him.”

 

He doesn’t ask how she knows this shit.  For everything the world’s taken from her, God gave her one thing back, at least according to Tig.  Every once in awhile, her crazy adds up to something worth remembering.

 

He watches her cross the parking lot, heading for the clubhouse, and tries to shake off the fear that lingers like a cold finger at the base of his spine. 

 

Laughing a little at himself, he heads outside, where Ope is waiting on his bike to take up their nightly patrol.  There’s not much to see inside the confines of Charming itself.  Despite the hell happening all around them, the town has changed surprisingly little.

 

There are fewer people, of course, and more guns out in the open, but generally, Hale keeps the peace and people live their lives.  The Sons bring fresh food when it’s needed, siphon gas from tankers abandoned on the highways beyond the town line, raid warehouses for foodstuffs and clothing, pharmacies and hospitals for drugs.  And though the effort is growing harder, the pickings thinning, Jax figures they can keep it up awhile more.

  
He’s got a feeling the end—the actual End, capital E, isn’t far off now, anyway.  Maybe this mysterious “He” is Death himself.

  
He’d like to go a few rounds with that fucker, make him pay a little for what he’s done, at least before Jax gives it up for good himself.

 

Hale is out making his own rounds, and they exchange nods and waves.  Miriam’s got the café open, and three or four families are eating there.  They sit at tables one next to the other, despite that there’s plenty of room for spreading out.  No one likes to be alone anymore.

 

The churches are, as usual, candlelit, music pouring out their doors from the congregated voices of the faithful, who keep hoping, Jax guesses, for some kind of miracle despite all the evidence that God Himself has abandoned them to their collective fate.

 

On Maple, a couple of kids play street hockey, stop to wave at them as they go by.  Parents watch from the porch, haunted eyes set back in their skulls, hands gripped tightly to the porch rails or rocker arms.

Main Street is quiet, a few late shoppers scurrying homeward, heads down, eyes averted, like they’ve been caught taking handouts.  It’s all charity these days, though, since money stopped meaning a damned thing.

 

Some people have a thriving business in barter, but mostly they just share what they’ve got with whoever needs it.  Jax waits for the inevitable day when they start turning on each other.

 

He hopes the End comes sooner.

 

As the rotting moon starts crawling up the sky, they finish their patrol of the perimeter—all’s quiet on the final frontier—and head back to the yard.  Jax leaves Ope with Rita, the third surviving sweetbutt, snags a cold beer from behind the bar, and heads for his place on the roof.  He sits down with a heavy release of breath, happy to not be moving for once, to have no one around to ask him for anything or expect him to have answers.

 

Opening his father’s book, he reads, _Sacrifice_ _is often required of those who have the most to lose…_

 

Jax snorts, takes a long pull on the bottle, slaps the binder shut, and closes his eyes.

  
He doesn’t need his dead father telling him what he already knows.

 

What he needs are some new words.

 

He should know better than to wish for anything.

 

***** 

 

 _There are a lot of things people tell you that you can’t believe, and then a lot of things that happen that people wouldn’t tell you.  Either way, disbelief is the usual response to what is, more often than not, true and real.  Up against the hard reality of things that don’t exist, people either give up or go down fighting.  I choose the latter course.  It’s a free world, still, no matter what the evil sons of bitches might want for it._   (The Book of Johns 11:1-5)

 

The road to Barstow is paved with good intentions.

 

At least, Dean thinks that has to be it, given how it’s clearly leading him straight to hell.

 

In actual fact, the desert has reclaimed a lot of the pavement, so the Impala slithers and burrows her way along, slower than he’d like, making nearly half the time he’d hoped.  At this rate, he’ll be in the wide open at nightfall and no sanctuary to be found.

 

Wrestling the wheel as she bulls through another drift, he curses the shimmy he’s noticed the last dozen miles and hopes it’ll keep until he can get somewhere to fix her.  Otherwise, it won’t matter what’s in Barstow—it’ll be the end of the road for him without wheels.

 

Not for the first time, he glances to the passenger side to see how Cindy is taking all the rocking and then remembers by the emptiness that he’s left her behind.  The pang then is familiar, a cold rush of remembered loss, and he wishes to hell it wasn’t bringing back another kind of memory.

 

Turning _Maiden_ up on the radio, Dean focuses on the next clear stretch of road, willing the Impala forward.  She makes it through another desert drift and finds purchase, rear tires spitting grit in a rooster tail as he gives her a little gas.

 

They’re in business. 

 

Awhile later—he’s lost count of the hours now, but not the light slowly leaking from the sky ahead—he passes a _Welcome to California_ sign, or what’s left of it.  Bullet-riddled, splattered with something that attracts swarms of flies, skewed off kilter by a broken strut, it sways a little in a rising desert breeze.

 

Dean snorts, spits road dust out the window, rolls it up.  The last time he was in California was when Sam…

 

He punches _Maiden_ out of the player, roots around one-handed for something else.  He’s distracted by a loose cassette near the bottom of the box, doesn’t see the roadblock until he’s practically on top of it.

  
The sliding stop they make doesn’t help the shimmy any, and the Impala lets out a scream as the tires smoke and protest.

 

The nose of the car stops inches from the rusted hulk blocking the road.

 

Dean’s already got the sawed-off in his left hand, his right reaching across his lap to roll the window down.  The engine idles, a broken growl bouncing off the jackknifed trailer.

 

“C’mon, you fuckers.  C’mon…”

 

The waiting has always been the hardest part of hunting for Dean, who prefers the direct approach to ambushes and subterfuge.

 

A movement, barely visible between the big rig’s rear tires.

 

Another.

 

A third.

  
Jesus, how many of ‘em are there?

 

Then Dean realizes he’s seeing the same movement repeated over and over.  Something hung up on the other side of the trailer, moving in the steadily growing wind.

 

Eyeing the shoulder at that end, he sees that it’s wide enough, and he backs the Impala up carefully, eyes trying to take in everything at once, expecting at any moment to hear the telltale thud of a weight on the roof.  He eases her over toward the shoulder, then, creeps around the end.

 

When he comes to the other side of the trailer and jolts up onto the road once more, he lets out a sigh of relief and lowers the gun.

 

Hanging from the roof of the trailer is the desiccated corpse of what might have been a monster.  Could’ve been an ordinary person, too, Dean supposes.  No saying for sure.  But written in viscous brown, lumpy in places and almost illegible, are the words, “Fuck u demonz,” taking up half the length of the long, once-white trailer.

 

He figures he must be near a decent-sized town for taggers to have made it out there.  It gives him momentary hope.

 

Sure enough, he sees the signs of civilization a few miles later, passing first the ubiquitous edge-of-town motel, neon sign shot out, car upside down in the empty in-ground, doors to all the rooms yawning wide.  Movement at one or two windows tells Dean it’s a hive, and he speeds up.

 

Ahead, the burned out crater that was once a gas station testifies to the violence in this place.

 

Main Street is almost quaint, low stucco buildings, mom-and-pop diner, a bar, a storefront Baptist church, a mini-mart, its lottery sign half un-moored in the blasted window.

 

Cars parked nose-in, doors flung open, back windows gone.  Here and there he spots remains, eyes skittering over them to avoid the details.

 

He’s almost out the other side of the no man’s land when movement in his rearview signals trouble and he sees a motorcycle coming up fast, rider’s hair streaming out behind him, chrome flinging shards of late afternoon sunlight into the air.

 

Not interested in finding out what breed of monster the biker is, Dean puts the pedal to the floor.  The Impala surges ahead, vibration growing exponentially, until his hands are tingling with trying to hold her steady.

 

“Shit!”

 

He glances in the rearview to see how close the rider’s getting, finds nothing behind him but the dust phantoms of his passage through.

 

Sideview tells him the same story, and he worries about an ambush, looking side to side and at every possible hiding spot ahead.

  
Nothing.

 

Still, he waits until he’s well clear of town, the “Thanks for Visiting Daggett” reduced to a pinprick in his rearview, before he slows her down to where she isn’t shuddering apart under his hands, soothes a hand over her dash like that’ll help, discovers that his teeth are aching and relaxes his jaw.

 

The sun is an orange sliver against a purple sky when he passes the first housing development on the outskirts of Barstow, Population 22,000, once.  Now, someone’s crossed out the first two numbers with black spray paint.

 

The highway widens, giving him more room to maneuver around the abandoned cars that make driving near sizeable cities that much more exciting.  It’s like when the end came, a lot of people were caught completely unawares, as though rains of toads were otherwise the norm and they couldn’t possibly have given up their carpooling routes for anything short of a biblical flood.

 

Now that he’s here, Dean’s not sure how to track down the “shepherd’s church” Sari talked about.  Cell phones had had the unfortunate side effect of removing roadside payphones, with their handy telephone books.  Up ahead, he sees a convenience mart, though, its wide plate windows smashed, aisles looted.  It should be safe enough if he pulls right up in front and keeps the engine running.

 

Inside, he steps over the leathery remains of an indistinct figure, over the scattered coins and battered drawer of the cash register, finds the ubiquitous yellow-paged tome where it usually is in these places.  He takes the whole thing, anxious to be back on the move, and pages through it as he drives, finding churches quickly enough, relieved to find that there are maybe two dozen in Barstow, but only one is—

 

“Shepherd of the Desert Lutheran Church,” he says aloud, and his voice startles him.  It’s the first time in eight hours he’s heard it.

 

A fierce loneliness burns through him then, and he swallows it down, refusing to look at the empty seat beside him, putting away memories of the people who’d shared this car with him once upon a time.

 

“Fairytales are for pussies,” he whispers, and then decides not to talk anymore.  The way his voice flattens out in the wide space of the car’s interior only makes it seem that much emptier.

 

A further perusal of the map of Barstow at the front of the phone book—some of the street names slightly obscured by the anatomically accurate drawing of a dick he finds there—tells him that the church is only a couple of miles away. 

 

He cruises through middle class neighborhoods with street names like Frances Drive and Stevens Street and does his best to take nothing in about the people who once lived there.

 

This is only partially successful.

 

He has to drive around a ten-speed bicycle, rear tire rim bent, that blocks the center of the road.

 

He drives over the curb and onto the sidewalk to get around a school bus flipped over on its side, emergency doors gaping, seatbelts spilling out like intestines.

 

The church is a church, plain and simple, its cross-hatched doors closed, plain yellow stained glass windows uncharacteristically intact.  Eschewing the parking lot, Dean drives the Impala up onto the side lawn and into an empty flower bed that borders the foundation, parallel parking until the passenger side door is only inches from the building.

 

Getting out, his eyes scan the neighborhood for suspicious movement. 

 

Usually, he can count on the car being unharmed if it’s close enough to the church, but he hates to leave her, regardless.

 

Retrieving Sari’s basket from the passenger seat and his duffle and the most needful weapons from the trunk, he walks up the narrow cobble path toward a side door and is surprised to find it unlocked, a condition he remedies once he’s through it.  Inside, the church smells musty, disused, though a faint odor of oil soap and candle wax pervades.

 

He feels his shoulders relaxing, forces himself to remain alert until he can scout out the whole building.

 

Ten minutes later, convinced that he’s alone and that it is, indeed, holy ground, Dean sets a kerosene lantern from the car on a kitchen table in the basement of the church and riffles through the cupboards, crowing when he discovers a can of beef stew that expired within the year.  Further searching turns up a pot and several cans of sterno.

 

“Yahtzee,” he says, forgetting his personal injunction about talking.

 

Though Sari’s flatbread is good, soaking up the greasy gravy of the stew, it makes him feel strangely lonely, and he puts the rest back, careful to cover it to keep it fresh.  Compromising with his bruised feelings, Dean pulls a muffin from the basket just before wrapping it up for good.

 

The taste of sweetened meal is still coating the back of his teeth when he hears breaking glass. 

 

Taking the stairs two at a time, twinging knee be damned, he bolts to the side door and tries to peer out the fanlight, straining to see the Impala in the faint moonlight that brightens an otherwise dark landscape.

 

No joy.

 

Breathing out a curse, Dean pulls a gun from the back of his pants, where he always keeps one, except when sleeping or driving, and eases the lock open.  It seems to take him hours to turn the handle and pull the door away from the jamb enough to see the car parked snug up against the building.

 

The rear window is intact, and he thinks that’s true of the side windows closest to the building, but he can’t make out the front or driver’s side.

 

He watches for long seconds, breath held, hoping to make out movement, wishing he wouldn’t.  He hates to think of his baby being violated by the ravening undead.

 

Nothing.

 

Then, the tinkle of glass, like it’s falling from an already broken window.

 

Close.

 

Shit, are they inside the church?  It’s supposed to be holy ground.  Everything about the place suggests that it is.  The cross is still over the altar, the altar itself untouched, the pews upright and in even rows.  He closes the door and locks it as quietly as he can, creeps the few feet across the entryway to peek around the interior jamb and into the church proper.

 

Nothing that he can see, but the pews are a perfect hiding place for all kinds of skulking evil.

 

“Shit,” he breathes out, and the word shudders and carries a little in the empty church. 

 

“Fuck it,” he adds, louder, stepping out to the center aisle in front of the steps that lead up to the altar.  “Come out where I can see you, you fucker.”

 

Silence.  He stands there a long time, gun up, hands steady, eyes growing increasingly accustomed to the shadowy spaces between the pews.  Still there’s no movement, no sound of any kind.

 

The screeching of metal on metal close by but definitely outside has Dean double-timing it to the side door, which once again takes him a glacial age to open.

 

This time, he sees what’s making the noise.  A whole herd of infected moving like rejects from _Thriller_ toward the door where he’s standing.

  
He could stay there and taunt them.  That’s usually good for a few laughs.  But it also typically leads to projectiles, and his baby might get the brunt of it. 

 

Besides, there are only so many bad puns even Dean can manage about the walking dead before it gets old.  And it got old way before Cleveland.

 

Shrugging off the inevitable shudder that name evokes, Dean closes and locks the door and heads back down to the basement, deciding to check the windows one more time before trying to get some sleep.  There’s a room down there furnished in beat-up, sprung old couches and scarred coffee tables held together with wood glue and prayers—probably where the youth group hung out on Saturday nights to avoid sinning, he thinks.

 

Anyway, he’s pretty sure the orange afghan over the back of the olive-drab sofa is mostly free of dead moths and the other detritus he’s come to look for in life after Laundromats, and he figures it’ll make for a nice addition to his impromptu bed.

 

Two nights in a row on something that passes for a sleeping surface? 

 

Next thing he’ll start wanting real coffee in the mornings and blow jobs at noon.

 

Dean snorts at his internal dialogue, sets up his guns on the coffee table the way he likes them, slides a knife under a musty pillow covered in crocheted yellow daisies, and tries to go to sleep.

 

It’s fitful at best, the occasional noises from topside intruding, his natural watchfulness making him jittery.  He misses Cindy more than he’d expected to, especially since he realizes how much he’d come to rely on her as a watchdog.  Too, he used to fall asleep stroking her silky head as she slept beside him in the front seat.

 

Still, he manages a few hours more or less uninterrupted, and when the first light of dawn washes weakly over the warped linoleum of the rec room floor, he’s ready to face the day.

 

He’s even readier when he finds ground coffee, inexplicably secreted in a blue Power Ranger sippy cup, and uses boiling water to brew himself the closest thing he’s had to coffee of any kind in well over two and a half years.

  
It’s heaven. 

 

Not really.  Dean suspects the soundtrack there would be heavier on the harps and have fewer demonically undead tenors.

 

He washes down the half-pack of stale graham crackers he found with the last of the coffee he’d brewed, and pours the rest of the dry grounds into double plastic bags, which he closes with two twist-ties and shoves deep into the bowels of his duffle.

 

Hey, it’s the best part of wakin’ up, right?

 

Brushing crumbs away from his handy map of Barstow, Dean locates the public library, happy to find that it’s less than two miles from the church.  Of course, from the sounds of the crowd outside, that two miles might take him two hours to traverse, but it has to be done.

 

The library is the only place likely to have information about the “children of chaos.”

 

He can’t just wander through California hoping to stumble over a flashing red arrow that reads:  The End Is Here.

 

Once more cautiously opening the side door, Dean sees that there’s a dozen or more undead milling around the Impala with a scant two feet between them and her dusty exterior.  She appears unharmed, however, which gives him some hope that he can make it to her without much work.

 

Still, for as much evidence as Dean has that the church is holy ground, it still takes a lot for him to open the door wider and step outside.

 

En masse, the group sways and shifts its collective, malevolent gaze on him.

 

He takes a step toward the Impala.

 

More shifting of weight, some movement, like they’re pressing against a glass wall that separates them from what they most desire.

 

The nearest to him are a woman and a man, once equally fit, maybe forties, neat hair gone ragged and wild, clothes torn and stained with fluids Dean doesn’t care to identify.  They give him identical, fixated glares.  The woman drools.  The man grins like the freak he is.

 

“Laugh it up, fuzzball,” he says, edging around the Impala’s trunk.

 

Two feet away, the man licks his cracked lips and moans.  The woman’s fingers work spasmodically, like she’s imagining the way the tender flesh of his throat would tear beneath her broken nails.

 

Four others gang up behind the couple, pushing, and a struggle breaks out as the two closest to him come up against the barrier that keeps them at bay.

 

The undead behind them don’t seem to respond to their distress, however, just shove in harder, more coming up now, massing behind the two.

 

The woman starts to slide to her knees, the skin of her face elongating like its being dragged down a rough surface.  She lets out a gurgling shriek.  The man, meanwhile, has his hands flat in front of his chest, like he’s trying to do a vertical push-up.  The pressure behind him builds, too.

 

Dean cracks open the driver’s side door, tosses the duffle in, has to turn the basket on its side to fit it through, and realizes his dilemma.  There’s no way he’s going to get through that opening.

 

And given the mass of bodies now crushed up against the unseen blockade beside the car, he’s not going to be able to open the door any wider, either.

 

“Shit!”

 

He considers his slim options and finally sighs resignedly, dropping his head to stare at his boots.  Then he raises his eyes and the gun and starts blasting over the top of the door frame, shouldering it into the mass of now writhing, screaming bodies.

 

Eventually, there’s enough room to get in.  He’s not fully settled in his seat when he’s racing to roll the window down and shoot through the gap, trying to wrestle the open door out of the hands of the infected.

 

Giving it up for impossible, Dean swears in a long, loud stream, shoves the keys into the ignition, starts her, and raises the volume on the Gunners as high as it can go without blowing the speakers.

 

The fingers on the doorframe start to tremble.  He puts her in drive and pumps the pedal, and slowly the hands drop away as the staggering horde plunges into one another, trampled from behind or crushed by the car’s tires as they fall beneath her front wheels.

 

Soon enough, he’s at the library, a modest, low building, glass doors gaping wide, paper scattered everywhere, like there was a tragic copier accident out front.

 

This time, the Impala won’t be safe for long, so Dean makes haste inside, ignoring the vacant eyes of powerless computers, monitors spewing their guts across keyboards missing most of the middle letters.

 

He finds local history almost by accident, wonders how he’s ever going to track down something as obscure as the phrase, “Chaos’ children,” when something catches his eye.

 

The center of the book is photographs, some in black and white, some in color.  Featured in one is a motorcycle gang decked out in leathers.  Across the back of the nearest rider, slightly blurred, are the words, “Sons of Anarchy.”

 

“No way,” Dean breathes, paging to the index at the back of the book and looking up the Sons.  A quick perusal tells him that they’re an MC with a pretty extensive reach.  The founding chapter is headquartered six hours or so north in Charming, California.

 

Dean remembers the phantom rider that had trailed him yesterday and shivers. 

 

A noise outside alerts him to his immediate danger, and Dean sprints back, book in one hand, gun up in the other, to find three undead kids making toward the car with baseball bats.

 

Some things don’t change. 

 

Dean guns the engine, blasts “Paradise City” just to be ironic, and then blows past them with a wicked grin.  He should make Charming by nightfall.

 

He hopes there’s sanctuary there.

 

***** 

 

 _The things I want for the Sons, and especially for my sons, are antithetical to what the world requires of men.  America says it wants independence, but in fact, it asks only for us to appear as though we have freedom. We are still to be subservient to lesser men who have the benefit of power though no right to it.  I console myself on dark nights by believing that when the end comes, it will take first the fools and then the liars and leave my sons behind to flourish.  The Sons will always be here in one way or another. After all, Anarchy is our namesake._ (Book of Johns 8:4-10)

 

“Church” isn’t a holy place anymore.  Bloodstains aside, there is always a faint, back-of-the-tongue tang of something vile, sulfur and burning flesh and human shit.

 

Jax grimaces as he enters, takes the place he always had as VP.  No one sits at the head of the table, not after what happened to the last guy who made it his throne.

 

Opie files in, then Bobby, followed by Piney, who’s bent over a little, shaking hands struggling to carry in his oxygen.  Chibs is next, swaying but more or less clear-eyed.  Juice comes in slowly, leading Tig, whose milky eyes make their way around the table like he’s seeing each of their faces.  The Prospect is last, allowed in by unanimous vote since there are so few of them anymore.  Kid’s mostly earned his rockers anyway.

 

“Barstow,” Tig says as Juice helps him into a chair.

 

“In a minute,” Jax answers, impatient. 

 

“There’s a shepherd in the desert,” Tig continues.

 

They all ignore him as they settle into their seats.

 

“Any news from Hap and Ziggy?”

 

The Nomads have possession of one of the few working satellite phones left and were supposed to check in every twelve hours.  They’re late by three and change.

 

Bobby shakes his head.  “Nothing.”

 

“Think they bought it?”  Tig asks it like he hadn’t just been spouting prophetic riddles.

 

“Nah,” Juice says.  “Hap’s unstoppable.”

 

Jax nods tightly, letting it go.  There’s nothing they can do about it.  The two were sent on a run to Modesto to scavenge batteries, medical supplies, the usual stuff in high demand in a town besieged on every side by all kinds of evil shit.

 

Their brothers’ll either be back or they won’t.

 

“Barstow is a wash,” Jax says, delivering it like a fact.

 

Predictably, Tig objects, head shaking, one hand smacking the tabletop for emphasis.  “We’ve got to go to Barstow.  There’s a shepherd—“

 

“—in the fucking desert.  Yeah, I heard you the first dozen times, Tig.  But we can’t get to Barstow, so the shepherd’s just gonna have to get to us.”

 

“No no no no no,” Tig says, hand pounding hard, head shaking convulsively.  “Nononono—“

 

“Oh, shit,” Ope says, starting to stand.

 

“Leave it,” Jax orders, gesturing for his VP to sit.

 

Ope gives Jax a searing look.

 

“Tig.”

 

Jax’s voice is low and hard, and Tig stops shaking, stops speaking, though his spittled lips still move over words none of them can hear.

 

“Anything else?”

 

Ope’s eyes turn harder still, but Jax ignores him.  This isn’t the time to grow a fuckin’ heart.  He needs to know what Tig is seeing.

 

“He’s coming.”

 

“Who?”

 

“Him.”

 

“You mean—“  Bobby asks it with wonder, like he’s afraid to complete his own question.

 

“Jesus Christ, no!” Tig answers, himself again.  “That part of it’s a bunch of bull.  I keep tellin’ you guys the end game’s going down here and we’re the defense.  There’s no savior coming to haul our asses out of hell.”

 

“Then who the fuck is coming?” Juice asks, leg jiggling under the table, one hand moving over invisible keys along the edge of it.

 

But Tig only shakes his head.  “Don’t know.”

 

“Don’t know or won’t tell us?”  Jax has been on the receiving end of some strategic silences in his time.

 

“ _I_ don’t know,” Tig clarifies, devil’s smirk lighting his ruined face.

 

“Tig.”  Opie’s voice is gentle but heavy with warning.

 

The former Enforcer turns his sightless eyes on the VP.  “He does, though.  Jax knows him.”

 

Seven pairs of eyes fix on Jax.

 

“Wait, you’re sayin’ _I_ know this guy?  From where?  Was I inside with him, or--?”

 

But Tig’s head is shaking rhythmically again.  “Nononono…”

 

“Okay, okay.  Jesus, Tig, settle down.”

 

The sunlight isn’t blotted from the sky.  A black veil doesn’t fall across their light.  Thunder doesn’t rend the world.

 

But God’s voice speaks at Church.

 

“John’s sons will make the world new, raising from the ashes of brotherhood a perfect place for the living.  And unto them will come three signs. 

 

One will be the Mother of Sorrows.  Her hand will stay the enemy.

 

One will be a son and brother marked for Death.

 

One will be a brother and son made to bring the end of the End.

 

In the last days let this be known.”

 

The voice is sepulchral, like it comes from the cracked teeth of unearthed graves, and Jax wonders if it’s his imagination that there’s a stench in the air like bodies burning.

 

Tig has slumped forward in his seat, eyes closed, breath heavy with unconsciousness.  They’re used to this, enough that Sack can pull a clean napkin from his pants pocket and tuck it under the prophet’s chin.

 

“Drool,” Sack explains, like they don’t all understand.

 

“’dja get it?” Jax asks him when he’s finished with this routine.  Sack nods, pointing to a dog-eared wire-bound notebook they keep near the table for just such unexpected visitations.

 

“What the fuck did that mean?” Ope wonders aloud, voice quiet, part reverence, part fear.

 

“It’s the usual boogity-boogity shit,” Piney offers, but he shifts uncomfortably in his seat and cannot quite make eye contact with his son.

 

“Well, we nae who the Mother o’ Sorrows be.”

 

Jax nods, jaw tight, can’t help his eyes straying to the Reaper, with its pink stains spreading out from the grain of the wood.

 

“You’re John’s son,” Ope remarks, somewhat obviously.  There’s still awe holding sway in his voice, and when Jax looks up, he sees that his friend is well and truly spooked.

 

“Lotta guys are probably sons of John.”

 

“Most of ‘em don’t keep company with a prophet of the end times, though,” Bobby notes, sensibly. 

 

Jax shrugs one shoulder like he could just wish away the whole fucking mess.  Days are gone when that was the case, though.

 

“Wish he’d wake up.”  He lets his irritation at every fucking thing seep into his voice.  Tig always passes out after he downloads some new revelation from on high.  And when he wakes up, he’s usually got a headache that makes him wish he were dead.

 

Nice perks being God’s bitch.

 

After the headache wanes, though, he can sometimes be counted on to explain the prophecies in a way that’s got a lower daily requirement of bullshit.

 

“He’ll be out for hours,” Piney says, no reproof there, only weariness and a certain resignation.  What he means is _I’m too old for this shit_.  They all hear it.  They all ignore it, too.

 

Juice looks to Jax.  “Any new orders of business?”

 

Jax shakes his head.  “Nah. Let’s give it a couple of days, see if we can’t get more on this so-called shepherd.  And wait to hear from Hap and Ziggy.  Hopefully, they’ll be back before too long.”

 

No one says it, but more than one set of eyes shies toward Piney and then away.  He’s on his last tank of oxygen.

 

“I’m getting a drink,” he says loudly, as if answering their worry. 

 

“I’ll join ya.”  Like anyone’s surprised by that.  Jax is convinced by now that Chibs sober would be a sign of the apocalypse for sure.  Maybe the sixty-sixth seal or some shit like that.

He snorts a little, and Ope, out of his seat and halfway to the door, gives him a look.

 

“Nothing.  Go get a drink with your dad.”

 

“What’re you going to do?”

 

Juice and Chibs have patrol tonight.

 

Jax shrugs.  He’ll head for the roof, see if his father doesn’t have some advice for him.  He doesn’t say that, though.  “Maybe I’ll find Kerry.”

 

Ope offers a brotherly grin.  “She likes you.”

 

“Everybody likes me,” Jax answers, leaning back a little in his seat, arms out as if to say, _What’s not to like about this?_

 

Ope snorts and waves Jax off.  “Later.”

 

“Yeah, brother, catch you in the morning.”

 

The sun’s leaving pieces of itself behind as it sets, gold and pink clotted up on the horizon like a scab.  The charred edges of the paper are familiar on Jax’s fingers, and he flips through at random, hoping for a sign, maybe.  Hoping for something.

 

_The things I want for the Sons, and especially for my sons, are antithetical to what the world requires of men._

 

It’s a different kind of riddle.  The shiver of prophecy races down Jax’s spine, and he closes the book, waiting for darkness to come so that he can be hidden from the world that watches him all the fucking time now.

 

When there’s only the glow of his cigarette to mark his place, some fallen star hovering close to earth before burning out, Jax relaxes a little and lets out a long sigh.

 

He’ll be ready for the shepherd, whoever he is.  What choice has he got, after all?  It’s not like he’s the one really calling the shots.  Cursing God got old a long time ago, though, so Jax satisfies himself with cursing in general before putting out his cigarette, stowing the book in its usual, waterproof hiding place, and climbing down to seek out Kerry, who really is good at helping him forget for awhile what’s real and true.

 

There’ll be time enough tomorrow to worry about what shit is coming.

 

*****

 

 _Life is about going through doors.  A lot of times you think you know what’s going to come of a choice, but when you get to the other side, you realize you were wrong.  Sometimes, being wrong can kill you.  Sometimes, you just wish it had._ (Book of Johns 11:1-4)

 

From where he’s idling a hundred yards away from the “Welcome to Charming, Our Name Says It All” sign, Dean doesn’t think much of the town.  Blocking the road is a pile of wrecks that would’ve made Bobby weep.  Cougars, Impalas, a whole zoo’s-worth of old Detroit steel, stacked in an undignified heap to keep people from passing through. 

 

It doesn’t escape Dean’s keen hunter’s eye that there’s a passage just wide enough for a Harley through the middle of all that junk.

 

The sun’s hugging the horizon to his left, bloodying the sky, and Dean’s kind of hoping there’s another way in that won’t involve ripping everything off the bottom of his baby by bushwhacking cross-fields.

 

He’s also hoping the welcoming committee gets its ass in gear before every evil fuck crawls out from under whatever rock hides them. 

 

“Time’s a-wastin’!” He yells out the lowered window, gunning the engine for effect. 

 

He’d lay on the horn, but he doesn’t want to be an asshole.

 

A lone engine, low and fast, answers, and he looks up to see his phantom biker from yesterday, yellow hair streaming out behind him, weaving out from the wreckage ahead.

 

He stops with a barricade of metal to either side, puts a sneakered foot down.  Waits.

 

Dean notices the guy’s cut, of course, but he’s more interested in playing a little game of which one of these things doesn’t belong.  Other than the leather vest that identifies him as a “Redwood Original”—and Dean plans to snicker over that later, when he’s not about to become demon chow—the kid’s dressed like a ‘banger from South Central. 

 

Or, at least, what Dean imagines they probably looked like:  baggy jeans, white tee, aforementioned footwear.

 

“Stoner chic,” Dean mutters to himself, and then snorts when the guy holds up a hand and waves him ahead.

 

“Right.  ‘Cause I was born yesterday and am deeply stupid.”

 

Dean rests the sawed-off on the sideview in response.

 

A smirk curls across the biker’s face, clear enough that Dean can see it in the feeble rays the sun gives up before succumbing to darkness.

 

Then, he surprises the shit out of Dean by rolling forward, one hand free of the handlebars and raised palm up in an “it’s okay, I’m not armed” gesture.

 

Dean keeps the gun steady on the guy’s chest, centering right over the word “Son” stenciled in black on the white tee.

 

When the bike’s thirty feet away, its rider stops, kicks the stand down, and dismounts.

 

Then he swaggers—and Dean’s not sure that’s the word for it, but stroll seems out of place, given the sounds of demonic mayhem he can hear approaching from behind him—like he’s got all the time in the world to give Dean directions to the Best Western or something.

 

“Hey, I’m Jax.”

 

Dean doesn’t offer his name.  Names give power.  Magic 101.  This kid obviously doesn’t have a clue.

 

“Nice car.”

 

“You come out here to compliment my ride, or do you want to invite me inside before those demons get here?”

 

The screaming wind, as of a thousand women keening over the bodies of their dead babies, has taken shape, a darker blot against the starless sky.

 

Jax’s eyes shift, but Dean can’t figure what it means, and then the guy is turning, giving Dean his back in a breathtaking display of either confidence or supreme stupidity.

 

The cocking of a gun to his right tells him it’s the former.

 

“Nice and slow, cowboy.  I’m going to be your navigator.”  The passenger door opens and a figure looms in Dean’s peripheral.

 

“Okay, but shotgun has to blow me when we stop for the night.”

 

A dry cough of a laugh.  “Leave the gun.”

 

“No.”  It ain’t happening.  That sawed off has been with him from the early days.  It’s got sweat and blood in the wooden grip from jobs he did with Dad and Sam long before any of them knew how bad it would get.  Before Dean knew what it was like to be alone for good and all.  Before Sam…

 

Metal on his neck provides grateful distraction.

 

“Ease it in nice and slow, then, and drop it on the seat.  Careful now.”

 

He does as he’s told, watching Jax get back on his bike, turn her around, head back through the junker bunker.

 

“Drive ahead a dozen feet and then make a left at the Pinto.”

 

The puke-green car is strangely familiar, and Dean opens his mouth to ask about it when the big guy—and man, he’s huge, almost as big as Sam—nudges him with the barrel of his gun.  Dean tightens his hands on the wheel.

 

“Easy.”

 

He nods, clenches his jaw but relaxes his grip.

 

“It’s a tight fit for this car, but we should be alright.”

 

“She’d better be alright,” he starts, and then considers that he isn’t really in a position to finish the threat.

 

The man snorts again but says nothing, only easing the gun away from Dean’s neck.

 

It’s a ninety-degree turn, narrow, and he has to rock her forward and back a few times before he can make it, eyes squinched almost shut as her left headlight just clears the rusted stump of an SUV mirror.

 

Letting out an audible breath—which brings a chuckle from Grizzly Adams there—Dean turns it to a breathy whistle when he sees the no-man’s-land that’s been cleared between the bunker and the town itself.

 

A wide swath of ground has been burned clear of any obstruction, and twin, narrow ruts signal a straight path to where the asphalt of a real road actually begins.

 

“You do all this?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Impressive.”

 

The guy shrugs. “Necessary.”

 

“This keep the demons out?” Dean asks, skeptical.  Those junkers might be nice for cover, but they don’t mean jack to demons unless they’re laid out in a pattern so esoteric even Dean’s never seen it before, and that seems unlikely.

 

“Nope.”

 

“What does?”

 

“You want that blow job, you’d better shut up.  You’re too chatty for me.”

 

It’s Dean’s turn to snort out a laugh, and he eases the car onto the rutted trail.

  
“Don’t go off the road.”

 

“Why?  You got a minefield out here?”

 

“Yep.”

 

Dean does a double-take of the guy’s face, stoic in the light generated by kliegs on stands to either side of the real road ahead.  He doesn’t look like he’s shitting Dean.

  
Still…

 

“You shittin’ me?”

 

“Nope.”

 

Dean’s hands are suddenly a little wet on the wheel, and he’s really happy when they get to the road proper.

 

“Stop.”

 

“What for?”

 

“To let me out.”

 

“That’s it?  You let me in town, so I’m good?”

 

Guy shakes his head, unpleasant smile on his face.

 

“Nope.  I just don’t want to be sitting here when the lightning strikes.”

 

“What--?”

 

Thunder rumbles overhead.

 

Dean has time to say, “Oh, SH—“ before a blinding lance shears out of the black sky and strikes the ground six inches from his front bumper, leaving a smoking crater in its wake.

 

Like that, the thunder dissipates into indigestive rumblings at some distance.

 

A slap on the roof overhead causes Dean to jump and curse, and he looks up to see the big guy standing there.

 

“Come ahead.  Take a left on Maple.  Three minutes.  Don’t speed.”

 

“Okay,” Dean says to himself, the big guy already gone, loping toward a Harley parked nose-in at the curb. 

 

He follows directions and comes to a second barrier, this one made up of stacked tires and the hoods of cars.  There’s a truck-sized opening, though, so at least he doesn’t have to sweat the Impala’s paint job.  No one is manning the “guardpost” that looks like it once did duty as a Foto-mat, so Dean rolls into the yard of “Teller-Morrow Automotive Repair.”

 

There are lights on, and he can hear a big generator pounding away somewhere.  To his right is another sizeable building, Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club in huge letters on the side announcing its purpose to the world.

 

A skinny kid with a sorry excuse for chin-fuzz comes out of the garage and gestures towards the end of a line of Harleys.  Dean parks there.

 

“Hey,” the kid says. “I’m Half-Sack.”

 

Dean can’t help but laugh before returning the kid’s shake.  “Do I wanna know?”

 

The kid ducks his head and gives a rueful laugh.  “Lost one in the war.”

 

“The demon war?”

 

To his credit, the kid only misses half a step.  “Uh, no.  The…the other war.”

 

“Oh.”  Dean sometimes forgets about Iraq.  Guess this kid probably can’t.  “Sorry.”

 

“Nah, it’s okay.  Girls love me.”

 

At that, Dean laughs out loud, the kid joining in.

 

“I’m Dean.”

 

Half-Sack ducks his head in acknowledgement.

 

“You passed the test.”  There’s some admiration there, like maybe Half-Sack wants to ask questions that aren’t his place to voice.

 

“Is that what it was?  Helluva guard-dog, in that case.”

 

Sack laughs a little and opens the door, goes through, lets Dean follow him.

 

Dean pauses just inside to take in what he’s seeing.    
  


It’s a big space, partially divided.  To his right, a bar, well-stocked and being tended by a smokin’ blonde wearing Daisy Dukes and a tiny tank that does nothing to hide her assets.  Two guys, one heavy-set and hairy, the other ancient and using oxygen, are knocking back shots.

 

To his left, the room opens up, a pool table, living area, computer desk.  He lets out an admiring whistle at the pole in the center of the floor on a round, raised platform.  “Nice,” he says to no one in particular.

 

Jax appears at his right elbow, closing a door marked “Office” behind him.  “Welcome to our house.”

 

Dean nods in appreciation.  “Nice digs.”

 

“We live right.”

 

Dean laughs, “Real church-goers, I’m sure.”  He looks in the direction of the room he can see through an open door straight ahead, the huge table, high-backed chairs, all of it saying “council space.”

 

“What do you know about church?”

 

Dean doesn’t say that he fooled around with a sweetbutt once upon a time, almost got his head crushed by a crew that must’ve gone a ton and a half, collectively.

 

Instead, he just shrugs.  “Been around.”

 

“Yeah?”  Jax says it like he knows Dean’s bluffing, but Dean lets it go.  He’s got other things to worry about. 

 

“So, I couldn’t help but notice the welcoming committee…”

 

Jax laughs.  “Ain’t us, man.  We just work here.”

 

“You got the big guy on your side, apparently.”

 

It’s Jax’s turn to shrug.

 

From a hallway leading to what Dean guesses are living quarters, Half-Sack appears, leading a man who looks like he went three rounds with a stump-grinder.

 

As soon as the man’s moon-white eyes land on Dean, the man freezes.  “The shepherd comes among the wolves, but he is unafraid.”

 

Dean gives Jax a wide-eyed look.

 

“Don’t ask.”

 

“Screw that, man.  That guy just said I was a shepherd.”

 

“Sack, where you takin’ him?”

 

“Said he wanted to meet Dean.”

 

Jax gives Dean a look of mock-hurt.  “You wouldn’t tell me your name, but you share it with the Prospect?”

 

“I met you before I got the governor’s reprieve and slipped inside your wards.”

 

Jax gives him a curious look but says nothing, turning back to the two men who are still moving cautiously toward the living area.

 

“How you feelin’, Tig?”

 

The blind man laughs, a high, pained sound.  “Head feels like J.C.’s usin’ her stilettos on it, but other than that…”

 

“Sack, get him his pills.”

 

The kid pulls a bottle from his shirt pocket, shakes it.  “On it, boss.”

 

Jax nods.

 

Dean watches Jax watching the two men, notices the way the man’s eyes take in all the details, the way the skin at the corners of his mouth tightens a little when Tig slumps in his seat, the way he tucks his hair behind his ears—long hair, a liability, but smooth and straight, fitting, somehow, and Dean walks the hell away from that observation.

 

“See somethin’ you like?”

 

Dean smirks and bluffs it out.  “I’ve always dug guys with one nut.”

 

Jax laughs, then, gives Dean an assessing look.  “Ope says he owes you a blow job.”

 

“I don’t play favorites.”

 

Jax laughs again, and Sack gives him an uncertain look from the sofa beside Tig, who’s washing down a handful of pills with a bottle of beer.

 

“Want a drink?”

 

“Thought you’d never ask.”

 

As they approach the bar, Jax points first to the heavyset guy and then to the old guy with oxygen.

 

“Dean, this is Bobby Elvis and Piney.  Piney’s a founder.”

 

Dean sees it by the patch, by the wear and tear on the guy, by the way he gives Dean a sort of assessing dismissal, like he’s seen too many new guys to get excited about this one.

 

Bobby nods.

  
“Elvis?”

 

Bobby tips his drink and says, “I’m the King, baby,” in the famous, familiar voice.

  
Dean smiles.  “Nice.”

 

Jax hands him a neat shot of something amber, and Dean doesn’t even stop to figure out what it is, shotgunning it with his head back, eyes closed.

  
“Nicer,” he manages after the burn subsides.

 

Jax slaps him on the shoulder, says, “Have a seat,” and winks at the bartender.  “This is J.C.”

 

“Nicest,” Dean says.  It’s sort of lame, he knows, but it’s the best he can manage.  He’s strung out from the road and from trying to take it all in.  This is the biggest group of actual people he’s seen in…he loses track of the count at a year and three months, gives up in favor of gunning another two shots.

 

“Hey, take it easy.  We’ve got some talkin’ to do.  And the night’s young.  You don’t want to disappoint J.C.”

 

Dean’s eyes take in the way her round breasts fill out the thin material of the white tank, the way the dip in her navel invites his eyes downward to the low-rise denim short shorts.

 

He sucks in a breath and pushes the shot-glass away.  It’s been a long time since he’s had hard liquor, and he doesn’t want to come off like a lightweight.

 

Besides, Jax is right. 

 

“So who did your wards?”

 

It’s not really the most important question—Dean has a feeling that one has the word “shepherd” in it—but he admires the security work and thinks fleetingly about how much Bobby would’ve liked it.

 

Jax is giving him a strange look, and when he takes in the faces of the other two—J.C. is noticeably absent now—he sees similar expressions of confused suspicion.

 

“You know, witch, wizard, whatever…Is it blessed iron?  Or something buried in the earth itself?”

 

Jax laughs a little, disbelief and uncertainty mingled in the sound.  “What are you talkin’ about?”

 

The penny drops, and it’s a testament to how tired Dean is that the whole fucking safe hadn’t already hit him on the head.

 

“You don’t know, do you?”

 

“Know what?”  And now he sounds pissed, like he’s tired of being jerked around.

 

Dean holds up a placating hand and shifts around on his bar stool to face Jax, who’s standing maybe three feet away, ugly look on his face.

 

“Look, you must know that some weird shit’s gone down.  I mean, you’ve got a freakin’ prophet of the apocalypse sitting on your sofa.”

 

Jax gives a jerk of his chin in a “go on” gesture.

 

“So you’ve probably seen demons, monsters, shit you never would’ve believed before a couple of years ago, right?”

 

“Fuck yeah,” Bobby affirms, tilting a longneck up for a pull.

 

“Well, if demons and werewolves and all the rest are real, why can’t witches be, too?”

 

Jax gives a sigh that sounds suspiciously like, “Oh, shit,” and sits on the stool one down from Dean’s.

 

“You’re sayin’ there’s magic…”

  
Dean nods, sips the beer that materialized in place of his shot-glass.

 

“…what, like Harry Potter shit?”

 

That’s the old man weighing in, and the scorn in his voice is deep as an ocean.

 

Dean can’t help the smirk, but he tries to keep it out of his voice.  It’s always fun popping this particular cherry.

 

“Nah.  Though if I ran into Hermione, I’d definitely tap that…”

 

Jax snorts, and they exchange identical leers.

 

“No, this is black magic, real blood-and-iron shit.  Mostly.  I mean, there are a handful of good witches.  Or were, I guess.”  His mind wanders to a little village in northern Colorado, to a brown-haired, bare-footed girl who could outshoot him, out-drink him, and most definitely wear him out in the bedroom.  Unfortunately, she didn’t outlive him.

 

When he comes back to the room, Jax is giving him a knowing look, and Dean shakes it off, masking his discomfort with a long swig of cold brew.

  
“God, that’s good.  Where do you get all of this shit?”

 

“Get on with it, kid.  Some of us ain’t gettin’ any younger.”  That’s the old guy.

 

“Anyway, when the gates opened and Lucifer rose, the bad mojo started getting tossed around like beads at Mardi Gras.  But there were some witches trying to help people, too.  I just figured you had one of them here.”

 

“Well, a lot of people say J.C. has a magic pussy, but beyond that, we’re just fresh out of hoodoo.”

 

Bobby’s eyes are bloodshot, lined with exhaustion that’s more than physical, and Dean can’t dismiss the weight of them on him.

 

“I’m telling you the truth.”  He holds the older man’s gaze.

 

Finally, Bobby nods.  “Yeah, okay.  So there’s magic.  But we ain’t got none here.”

 

“Then why aren’t you overrun with demons and the infected?”

 

Dean’s mostly wondering out loud, figuring these guys don’t have a clue what they’re up against, but an answer comes from behind him, making him turn so fast on the stool that he gets a little dizzy.

  
He tells himself that it’s just because he’s tired.  His self gives a nasty chuckle in return.

 

“God watches over us.  We are his children for the end times.”

 

From the way Half-Sack is shifting down the couch away from the blind man, Dean suspects that Tig isn’t exactly himself in these moments. 

 

The hollow, deep tones that come next confirm his suspicions.

 

“The shepherd shall lead them out of darkness and into the light of the final fire.  One of the sons of John shall perish and the other be marked for death.  And all who see them will know them, for they are the final arbiters of justice and without them, life shall perish from the earth.”

 

The man slumps forward as soon as he’s done speaking, and Dean’s startled into a sound.

 

“Don’t worry about it.  He always does that.  He’ll be fine.”

 

Sack eases the man’s head and shoulders down to the couch, swings his legs up, covers him with an afghan.  It’s obviously an old routine.

 

“What the fuck is he talking about?  Who are the Sons of John?”

 

Dean says it like it’s the name of a rival MC.  He’s decidedly _not_ thinking about his own, actual, very dead father.

 

Jax shakes his head.  “When Tig wakes up, you can ask him yourself.  Usually, he translates for us into talk that isn’t riddles and bullshit.”

 

Piney’s bark of laughter is unkind.  “Guy’s a few pistons short of a working engine, you ask me.”

 

“I didn’t.”  Jax’s tone is final, and the old man has the grace to look a little sheepish.  “Anyway…time for you to answer some questions for us.”

 

Fair’s fair, but Dean sighs anyway.  He’s tired, tired enough to hit the hay without J.C., even.

 

Still, he’s a guest here, and he has a lot more questions of his own.

 

He gives a little half-wave, as if to say, “Bring it on.”

 

“What’s your real name, for starters.”

 

“Dean Winchester.”

 

“Like the rifle?”

 

Dean nods.

 

“Where you from?”

 

This earns a laugh.  It’s not exactly a happy sound.

 

“Told you before.  I’ve been around.”

 

“Where you coming from, then?”

 

“Arizona.”  He’ll be damned if he’s giving up Sari’s sanctuary to these guys, God’s chosen—and that remains to be seen—or no.

 

“What’s in Arizona?”  That’s Bobby, and his voice is measured, like he knows Dean’s hiding something.

 

“A friend.”

 

“She hot?”

 

Dean smirks and says nothing.  Let the pervs think it’s about that.

 

“He hot?”

 

That’s the big guy, the one Jax called “Ope,” who’s appeared from the long hallway leading in from the exterior door.

 

Dean grins.  “Jealous?”

 

Ope grabs his crotch and swings his long leg over a stool on the other side of Jax.  It’s getting a little crowded at the bar.  J.C. serves him a beer.

 

“Kid okay?”

 

That wipes the smile off of Ope’s face, earns Jax a tight nod.  The big man subsides into a practically visible bubble of leave-me-the-fuck-alone.

 

“What do you do for a living, Dean?”

 

Jax says it with mock formality, like it’s a freakin’ job interview.

 

Dean smiles charmingly, puts on his best television-announcer voice.  “Well, I sell Avon by day, Jax, and at night, I like to hold card parties with the girls.”

 

Sack’s hyena’s laugh reach them from one of the round tables not far from the bar itself.

 

They all spend a half minute chuckling.

 

Then Jax’s face gets serious and he gives Dean a look.

  
“I’m a hunter.  Demons, poltergeists, vampires.  If it’s evil, I kill it.  Or, you know, I used to.”

 

“And now?”

 

Dean shrugs.  “Too much fucking evil.  I do what I can.”

 

“But why did you come to Charming?  How’d you know to come here?”

 

Dean takes a minute to think, peeling the label off his sweating beer with his thumb and wondering how much he can say without giving away things they don’t have a right to, stuff he plans to take to his grave.

 

“There was a prophecy,” he starts, cutting Sari out of the equation with some grammatical surgery.  “Said that the end would come where chaos’ children lived.”  Dean shrugs.  “Process of elimination led me here.”

 

“You try the other charters first?”  And there’s hope in Jax’s voice that Dean hates to douse, but…

 

“No.  Someone—I figured out you were in California.  The prophecy was kind of vague after that, though.”

 

“You come through Barstow?”

 

Dean raises an eyebrow and looks hard at Jax.

 

Jax tilts his head in the direction of the sleeping prophet, indicating the source of his information.

 

“So this Shepherd shit is about me?”  Dean’s grateful to bring the conversation back to safer ground.

 

But Jax is ahead of him, shaking his head.  “Nuh-uh.  You gotta give us more than that first.”

 

Dean drops his eyes, flutters his lashes against his cheek, looks up from underneath them with faux-innocence.  “I don’t really know you that well, but…”

 

And like that, Ope is off his stool and shoving into Dean’s personal space, pushing him off-balance, the bar digging into Dean’s back, his right hand pinned, left shoving uselessly at a wall of leather-clad flesh.

 

“You think this is funny, you fucking flirt?  You think you can come here and jerk us around just ‘cause God gave you the okay?  We decide who’s okay and who’s not, and so far, you aren’t impressing me.”

 

“Ope, back off.” But Jax’s words have no visible effect on the angry man.

 

Dean gives the big man his eyes, a steady stare that says he isn’t afraid of anything the biker can dish out.  He raises the left hand that’s otherwise been ineffectual at getting the guy out of his space and touches a silver scar that runs behind his ear and down his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of the tee-shirt he’s wearing under his leather.

 

“You see this?”

 

Ope jerks his chin, a muscle in his jaw ticking viciously.

 

“I got this when a witch tried to shove his magic dagger into my neck to dig out my larynx for his spell.”

 

“See this one?”  He points to a silver thread that crosses from the inside corner of his left eye to transect his cheek.  He traces its almost mirror twin three inches below it, from the base of his nose to midway up his cheekbone.  “Vampire tried to eat my face.”

 

The guy’s eyes widen a fraction of an inch.

 

“Point is, you don’t scare me, big guy.  Not one of you alone, not all of you together.  There’s nothing in this room that can scare me more than the things I’ve seen out there.  And I killed every one of the sons of bitches who put the scars on my body.” That’s not strictly true, but there are stories Dean will never, ever tell.

 

“So you want to step back, or am I going to have to get violent here?”  Still, his gaze doesn’t waver.

 

He sees it in Ope’s eyes, the moment the man decides Dean’s worthy, maybe not of trust, not yet, but of something.  With a gruff sound, the biker steps back and returns to his stool on the other side of Jax.

 

Jax gives Dean a smirk.  “You got balls, I’ll give you that.  I’ve seen Opie take guys bigger’n you apart.”

 

Dean lets one shoulder rise and fall.  “I’ve seen guys bigger’n Opie taken apart by children all cracked out on demon juice.”

 

Jax’s smile slides into something else, something sorrowful.  It makes him look decades older, like he’s just slipped into his father’s skin.

 

“The Shepherd has come,” a woman’s voice intones from the hallway that disappears into darkness beyond the bar’s far edge.  From the doorway an older woman appears, long hair tumbled about her shoulders, taut body poured into jeans and a lacy tank, over it a shirt that does nothing to hide her exceptional rack.

 

But her tits aren’t what Dean’s got his eyes fixed on.  Her face is aglow with an inner light, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears, lips parted like she’s just seen something miraculous.

 

She’s looking right at Dean.

 

“You’re the Shepherd,” she says, holding out her hand like she wants to touch him but isn’t sure it’s allowed.

 

Jax puts up an arm to block her way.  “Mom,” he says in a warning voice.

  
“No, it’s okay,” Dean answers, holding out his hand to her.  He can’t explain why he’s compelled to the action, can’t say why he’s filled with a sudden sense that he’s right where he’s supposed to be.  He just waits for her to touch him, sure that it’s the only way to make anything right.

 

When her long fingers fit into his callused hand, he feels a shiver of electric run up his arm and down his spine, grounding him in his seat.  From the breathy sound she makes, the woman feels it, too.

 

“You’re the one,” she breathes.

 

“Mom,” Jax says in a different, more patient voice.  “Mom, this is Dean.  He’s come to help us.”

 

In point of fact, Dean hasn’t promised anything like that, but he guesses destiny is doing its work, and who is he to complain, really, when even God has approved his presence there?

 

Besides, with her hand in his, he can’t really object to the notion that he’s right where he belongs.

 

“It’s good to meet you, Dean.  You going to let go of my hand, or is my son going to have to defend my honor?”

 

The change in her demeanor is so sudden that Dean is startled into dropping her hand like it’s electrified, and not in the holy-fire kind of way he’d just experienced.

 

But his reaction is nothing compared to Jax’s.

 

The president of the Sons of Anarchy slides off his stool and takes a half-step toward his mother, who’s turned to look at Jax with an expression of amused confusion.

  
“You been hittin’ the weed too much again, Jax?  You know that always turns you into a pussy.”

 

“Mom,” Jax says, his voice barely audible.  And then he’s holding her in a fierce embrace, face pressed to her hair, eyes shut on tears leaking slowly down his cheeks.

 

“Jax,” and now her voice is alarmed.  “Jax, what is it?  Did something happen?  Are you okay?  What’s wrong, baby?”

 

Pushing back a little but not letting her go, Jax looks into her face, as though searching for a sign of something only he’ll be able to see.

 

“Nothing’s wrong, Mom.  Everything’s fine.  It’s just good to see you.”

 

The woman nods as though this makes sense, though clearly she’s still a little mystified.  Dean surveys the others’ faces then and sees on them identical expressions, as though they’ve just seen someone turn water to wine.

 

Jax lets her go, then, but keeps his eyes on her as she walks toward the table where Half-Sack is sitting.  Catching sight of Tig on the sofa, though, she changes her course.

 

Jax signals to Sack, who leaps up to follow after her.  Tig’s apparently untrustworthy, even in sleep.

 

Dean files that fact away.

 

“Who the fuck are you?” Jax growls, voice low so it doesn’t carry to where his mother is fussing audibly over Tig’s unconscious form.

 

Dean sees the panic in Jax’s eyes, knows the man’s in over his head and struggling to keep from drowning in what he doesn’t know.

 

“Look, I’ve had a long day.  I’ll be glad to tell you more tomorrow.  But if I don’t get some shut-eye, I’m not going to make much sense pretty soon.”

 

The tension in the other man’s jaw eases a little and he gives the tiniest nod, as if concession pains him.  Then he turns toward J.C., who has once again mysteriously reappeared behind the bar.

 

“J.C., why don’t you make Dean at home?”

 

J.C. comes around the bar and loops her arm through Dean’s, tugging a little in the direction of the hallway from which Jax’s mom had appeared.

 

“You need anything, just ask J.C.”  Jax says it warmly enough, like hospitality is a rule of the house, regardless of what other shit is going down.

 

“Thanks.” Dean isn’t sure he’s going to be able to put his money where his mouth was earlier, at least as far as the girl is concerned, but it’s nice to follow those long legs and great ass down the hallway, great to brush by her as she shows him his room, great to feel her wriggle up against him to get by him and retrieve a clean towel from the top drawer of a cheap, beat-up dresser against one wall.

 

“Whose room was this?” He asks before he thinks better of it.

  
J.C. smiles.  “We’ve always got spare rooms.  For visiting charters and stuff.”

 

Dean nods like he understands the way of the MC and says, “Bathroom?”

 

She giggles and wiggles her fingers in a “follow me” sort of way.

 

Suddenly, his body finds extra reserves of energy.  He wonders if there’s a shower…

 

*****

 

 _Brotherhood isn’t about the blood you’re born with.  It’s about the blood you’ll give up for your brothers.  No one can love you like a brother.  No one can kill you like one, either._ (Book of Johns 16:7-11)

 

Jax can’t stop staring at his mother, who is perched on the coffee table beside the still-sleeping Tig, tracing soothing fingertips over his forehead.

 

Even from his seat at the bar, he can see the way the lines of the prophet’s face go slack at her touch.

 

“You think this guy’s for real?”

 

Hearing Opie’s tone, Bobby and Piney get up and bid the boys goodnight, head for their respective rooms in back.  When they’re gone,  Jax turns to look at his VP.  Ope’s not looking back, though.  He’s staring at the shredded label of Dean’s discarded beer.

 

Jax snorts.  “Hell, I don’t know, man.  Tig says he is.”

 

Ope does look up then, and the look is a speaking one.  It says:  _Are you fucking serious?_

 

“Guy’s talking about witchcraft, Jax.”

 

“’sthat any crazier than Tig as a prophet of the Lord?”

 

It’s Ope’s turn to snort.  “Yeah, okay.  But this guy…vampire hunting?  Werewolves...demons.”

 

“We’ve seen demons, Opie.” 

 

They share a long look, the memory almost visible between them of what happened to Clay.

 

By mutual but unspoken agreement, they shift the subject away from demons.

 

“We’d be fools not to believe that something’s going on bigger than we understand.  We’ve known that from the beginning.  Dean might be able to explain some of it to us.”

 

Ope turns a little to take in his president.  “What difference does that make?  Knowing what’s happening doesn’t change it.”

 

“If Tig’s right, there might be a way to—“

 

“To what?  Save the world?”  Ope’s scorn is heavily laced with weariness.  He’s lost so much already.  Jax can see his point.  Still…it’s that hope thing.

 

“We’ve gotta try, Ope.  It’s what’s left for us to do.”

 

Ope nods once, taciturn expression turned downward at the dull gleam of the bar’s wood.  Jax thinks they’ve put it to rest, starts to get up to talk to Gemma, when Opie says, quiet, “There some other reason you’re so quick to trust a stranger, Jax?”

 

Jax gives Opie a startled look.  “What are you talkin’ about?”

 

“Tig said you’d know the shepherd.  You met Dean before?”

 

“If I had, don’t you think I’d tell you?”

 

Opie shakes his head, spreads the fingers of one hand wide on the bar, looking at them, not his best friend, when he says the next thing:  “I don’t know.  You keep a lot of things to yourself these days.  And Dean is…”  He trails off with a gesture of the same hand, an indefinite motion that Jax still has no trouble interpreting.

 

Cold lances through him, settling in his belly, and he feels sweat prickling at the nape of his neck.  Ope’s treading dangerously close to ground they never cover. 

 

Jax stands up then, faces Ope, waits for his friend to look at him full on.

 

“You think I’d put personal interests ahead of what’s best for this club?  Thought you knew me better than that, Ope.”  He turns away without waiting for his VP’s response, crosses toward Gemma, belly still heavy with cold, mind ticking over like a revved engine.  He won’t deny that he likes what he sees in Dean, but he’s not about to jeopardize the safety of everyone and everything he loves just to satisfy some basic need.  It troubles him how Opie is right about one thing, though:  Jax already believes Dean, can already feel a certain trust growing.  It’s too soon for that and there are way too many angles to figure out first. 

 

He’s gotta talk to Tig once the guy’s conscious again.

 

Meanwhile…

 

“How you doin’, Mom?”  He keeps his voice low, in deference to the sleeping prophet.

 

“I’m alright, baby,” Gemma says, standing up and leading Jax away, back toward the bar, which Opie has vacated.  Half-Sack is nowhere to be seen.  It’s just Jax and Gemma awake in the world.  At least, it feels that way to Jax.

 

Gemma sits at a table, pats her pockets absently, looks momentarily nonplussed.  “You got a cigarette?”

 

Jax produces his pack, offers her one, lights it.  He watches her take a long, slow drag, her obvious pleasure almost palpable.  Then she coughs, smoke puffing out of the corners of her surprised mouth.

 

“What the hell?”

 

“You haven’t smoked in months, Mom.  Gave it up.  Don’t you remember?”

 

Really, they’d had to break Gemma of the habit the third time she’d left a cigarette burning somewhere and almost set the whole place on fire.  It had been painfully easy to distract her from the need, to mislead her into misremembering her favorite vice.

 

Gemma looks so lost at Jax’s explanation that he feels his heart climb up his throat.  Is she gone again?

 

“Yeah,” she says then, though, halting his panic.  “Yeah, I guess I do.  Things have been kinda…vague…for awhile.  Since your father’s—since Clay’s—death.”

 

Jax nods, pats the hand that’s not holding a cigarette, and she covers his hand with the other, little cherry light glowing orange between her fingers.  He has to look away, like something in the back’s distracting him, so he can get it together enough to go on.  He’s so fucking glad she’s better.

 

“You look tired, baby.”

 

He smiles a little at that.  “I’m okay.  Just got a lot on my mind.”

 

“You’re worried about Dean.”

 

He narrows his eyes a little at her, alarmed at how certain she is when she says that, like she knows something he doesn’t.

 

“He’s a wild card.”

 

“He’s a savior.  You both are.”

 

Gemma takes a pull of the cigarette, and he uses it as an excuse to move his hand away.  There’s something off here.  His mother is back, but that’s not all that’s here.

 

“Don’t look at me like that, Jackson Teller.  I diapered that ass of yours, and I can smack the hell out of it, too.”

 

He can’t help but chuckle.  It sure sounds like his mother.

 

“I remember things, Jax.  Or…I guess I know them.”  She sounds uncertain, like she’s feeling her way toward the words she needs.  “I’ve been seeing the world through fog for months.  I was here but not here.  And there was a voice, sometimes.  Not in my head, either.  Like from above or outside.”  She waves the cigarette around, shakes her head.  “I can’t explain it.  Sometimes it would offer me comfort, and sometimes it would tell me things, and I would know they were true, even if I shouldn’t have known that.”

 

She looks at Jax a little helplessly, hands spread palms up.  “You probably think I’m a nutjob.”

 

“I got a prophet of the Lord sleeping on my couch, Ma.  I don’t think you’re crazy.”

 

“Yeah.”  She says it like she doesn’t quite believe him but isn’t going to argue.  Stubbing out the cigarette, she lets go of a last stream of smoke before standing.  “I’m tired, baby.  I’m going to bed.”  She leans down to kiss him, but instead of brushing his cheek, she rests her lips on his forehead for a long minute, in a gesture almost formal, like a benediction.  She whispers something as she straightens up, something Jax doesn’t quite catch.

 

“What?” he asks her, searching her face.

 

But she just returns a familiar smile and says, “Get some rest, Jax.” 

 

He nods absently, returns her soft, “Goodnight,” with one of his own, and watches her until she disappears into the room they’d converted from storage for her, back when it became clear she couldn’t be trusted on her own.

 

They mostly all live here now, even the sweetbutts, Kerry and J.C. and Rita, taking turns with the guys or bunking together in a little room the floor of which is covered mostly in mattresses.  It isn’t fancy, but it works, and the girls seem to feel safer sleeping close like that.  Jax always feels better when the house is full, so he waits up, Chibs and Juice having pulled patrol for a second night.

 

They should’ve been back hours ago.

 

As if his worry has somehow summoned them, they come through the door.  They look tired but unhurt, and Jax lets out a little breath of relief before saying, “Anything wrong?”

 

Chibs shakes his head.  “Miriam had scones,” like that explains everything.  And actually, it does.  The café’s proprietor had a corner on denial and liked to flout every evidence of the end by baking at the strangest hours.  Jax doesn’t blame them for stopping off for a late-night snack.

 

“Hale wants to see you in the morning,” Juice adds, walking past on his way to the back.

 

Jax gives Chibs an inquiring look.

 

“Something about a supply run.  Market’s low on meat.”

 

Internally cursing—supply runs in the last few weeks have gotten perilous, as evidenced by the foreboding silence of Hap and Ziggy, who should’ve checked in thirty-six hours ago—Jax answers, “Yeah, alright.”

 

Chibs helps himself to a glass, pours a tall, neat scotch, throws it back, and then puts the glass down with a final-sounding thunk.  “Off to bed.  He okay?”

 

Jax looks at Tig, curled on his side on the sofa, sound asleep but twitching.

 

“Incoming,” he says.  They’re all used to the vagaries of Tig’s “gift.”

 

Chibs makes a sympathetic face and then waves, heading for his room without another word.

 

Alone in the silence of the big room, Jax stares unseeingly at the _S of A_ banner hung on the wall over the sofa where Tig sleeps, snoring a little now and making breathy sounds of pain.  Jax knows better than to try to wake the prophet up, though.  The longer he sleeps, the less pain he’ll have tomorrow.

 

Standing up, Jax considers having a drink, decides against it, and instead heads wearily to his room, wondering if one of the girls is bunking in there, waiting for him.  Sometimes they like to surprise him.

  
He still hasn’t decided whether or not he’d rather be alone when he opens the door to find the room empty, settling the question.  Sighing, he kicks out of his sneakers, shrugs out of his cut and puts it over a chair back, strips off his tee, drops his jeans, leaving them where they fall, and climbs under the covers, hoping he’ll sleep all the way through for once.  He’s tired of nightmares—real or otherwise—waking him in the wee hours.

 

Just as sleep is rising over him like a wave, Jax wonders how Dean’s getting along with J.C.  The way that thought wakes him all the way up again has nothing to do with jealousy, he tells himself.

 

Miriam’s not the only one good at denial.

 

*****

 

 _In this life, asking someone for help is the same thing as putting a target on their backs._ (Book of Johns 9:5)

 

There’s a warm weight on his chest and a heavy one on his bladder, and Dean’s just trying to decide which is more urgently in need of attention when there’s a sharp rap on the door.

  
One-two-three.

 

“Meeting in five.”

 

Dean groans in response, feeling J.C.’s hair tickling his chin, and puts his hands anywhere he can find a grip, trying to shift her off of him.  “Get up, sweetheart.  I’ve gotta be somewhere.”

 

She moans, low and throaty, which does things to Dean’s dick.  A few hours ago, he would’ve sworn nothing could possibly get him up again.  He’s glad he was wrong.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t have time to follow that discovery through to its happy end.

 

He slides out from under the girl as carefully as he can and smiles a little to see the way she burrows into the warm spot his body left behind.  Then he stumbles around finding jeans and tee shirt and socks and boots, wishing he had time to get clean clothes—or what passes for clean, anyway—from the car before he has to be anywhere.  Deciding the best he can do is piss and maybe rinse his mouth out with something that isn’t beer, he hits the head, finds it occupied, and wanders out into the big room.

 

Jax gives him a wicked grin from the bar, glass of orange juice—or maybe a screwdriver, for all Dean knows about the guy’s habits—in front of him.

 

“Got another can?”

 

Jax jerks a thumb toward the office.  “Private one through there.  You can use it.  Just knock first.  Mom might be in there.”

 

The office is surprisingly neat, well tended, the desk mostly clear of clutter, an empty cordless phone dock sitting beside a useless computer.  He finds the bathroom door ajar, goes in, does his business, splashing some water over his face, swishing and spitting some Listerine he finds in the cabinet over the sink. 

 

He feels a little more human, anyway.  A survey of his face in the mirror says he could use a shave, but otherwise, he’s okay. 

 

Of course, “okay” is relative.  He hasn’t looked in a mirror large enough to take in his whole face since…hell, Memphis?  Yeah, he guesses.  It was that long ago.  And he never spent much time trying to see himself in the Impala’s mirrors, except for those rare occasions when he has the luxury of time and safety to shave.  Even then, he tends to avoid his eyes.

 

He hopes his face doesn’t tell other people what it says to him when he stares at it now.

 

Shaking his head at the places his mind takes him these days, Dean washes his hands, marveling, as he had done last night in the shower, at the steady supply of warm, clean water coming out of the tap.  These guys have it good.

 

When he emerges from the office, he sees Jax has moved to a round table and has been joined by two guys Dean hasn’t met yet, a tattooed Hispanic guy and a thick-haired older man, face pitted from acne or asphalt, maybe both.

 

“Dean, this is Chibs.”  The older guy offers his hands and says something in what Dean thinks might be English.

 

“I’m sorry?” he says, squinting a little, like that will help him translate.

 

The younger guy laughs.  “Don’t be.  None of us has a clue what Chibs is saying most of the time.  I’m Juice.”  The kid’s got a good grip and a great smile, and Dean finds himself grinning in return.

 

Jax clears his throat.  “Save the lovin’ for later, boys.”

 

Dean laughs.  Juice blushes.  _Blushes_.  Which only makes Dean laugh harder.

 

“Okay, kids.  Settle down.”

 

Dean sinks into a chair across from Jax, gives him a waiting look.

 

“Chibs and Juice had patrol last night.”  And before Dean can ask, “We ride the perimeter every night, just to make sure nothing’s hinky.”

 

Dean gives an approving nod.

 

“And Chief Hale—he’s the new chief.  The old chief died.  Hale says he wants a meeting.”

 

“He a stand-up cop?”

 

And by “stand-up,” Dean means, “Not an asshole.”

 

Jax seems to hear what Dean doesn’t say.  He huffs out a shallow laugh.  “No, he’s definitely a self-righteous prick.  But he also knows that Charming needs us.  Always has, always will.  Anyway, he coordinates with the civilians.  They’ve got a council that makes decisions for them.  Hale comes to us when they need something.”

 

“You got a little league and an ice cream truck and a drive-in, too?  Jesus.”

 

Dean can’t help the sarcasm.  He’s doing his best to mask a frustrated wonder.  These guys are sitting smack dab in the middle of the ugliest evil in the world, and they’re talking town councils and chiefs of police.

 

“You got a problem with way we’re running Charming?”  The warning in Jax’s voice is unmistakable.  Only an idiot would misread it, and Dean’s no idiot.  Still, he pushes because it’s what he does best.  And maybe, yeah, because he’s a little bitter.  He’s spent the last two and a half years one step ahead of hell itself.

  
These guys have spent it having hot showers and throwing back cold beer.

 

Dean’s got a mean poker face, but he’s also tired, so maybe some of his true feeling shows.  Or maybe Jax is just really good at reading him.

 

That makes Dean uncomfortable, which pisses him off.

 

“No, not at all.  Why would I have a problem with you guys playing Pleasantville while the rest of the world goes to hell?”

 

Jax doesn’t stand up, push back his chair, get a fist full of Dean’s shirt.  Dean’s pretty sure that’s only because he’s a better leader than Dean gave him credit for.

  
Instead, a really ugly smirk crawls across Jax’s face.  The heat of the man’s anger is all in the eyes, which are drilling darkly into the center of Dean’s forehead.  He resists moving in his seat, but he doesn’t like the weight of those eyes on him.

 

“I’ve kept a town of a thousand people alive for two and a half years while the moon ate itself away and the stars went out and things I can’t even name prowled around the edges of our sleep every fucking night.  I call that pretty damned good.  And I don’t see you trailing family in with you.  Who’d you keep alive, Winchester?”

 

Dean can feel the edge of one eye twitching, feel the corners of his mouth turning down.  He doesn’t flinch, not exactly, but Jax’s words are too true, too close to what used to be home for Dean not to react at all.

 

He’s out of his seat in a second, hands at Jax’s cut collar, yanking the cocky asshole out of his seat.

 

Jax comes out of the chair like a rocket, brings his hands up on the inside of Dean’s wrists to drop the grip, and Dean’s stepping back out of range as Jax squares off with him.

 

Chibs and Juice have backed away from the table and are watching from the safe distance of the bar.  It doesn’t look like they intend to interfere.

 

A movement at his periphery has Dean pivoting, hands ready, feet set, when he sees Jax’s mom there.  On her face is a look of such raw sadness that the anger washes out of him, leaving him feeling only sorrow of his own, choking him.  He takes a deep, shaking breath.

 

“Mom,” Jax starts, and out of the corner of his eye, Dean sees that the other man is likewise disarmed, standing with his hands loose at his sides, fists unclenching as he takes in the woman’s face.

 

“You’ve lost so much, the two of you.  Can’t you see you’re the same?”

 

“Mom,” Jax says again, this time a little desperate, fear apparent in his voice. 

 

“Jax, it’s okay.  I’m not speaking in riddles.  I just know when I see two souls lost in the same way.”

 

“The Mother of Sorrows is the seer of truth.”

 

Dean turns, startled to find last night’s prophet sitting upright, cradling his head in cupped hands, bent forward over his knees.  His voice is muffled but clear enough as he continues:

 

“In other words, don’t be a jackass, Jax.  You and Dean should kiss and make up.”

 

Dean steals another glance at Jax and sees what he imagines is his own expression reflected on Jax’s face.  Stubborn sheepishness mingled with just the faintest flush of embarrassment.  Or something less innocent, maybe.

  
The thought makes Dean clear his throat and turn to face Jax’s mom.

  
“Mrs.—“ which is when Dean realizes he has no idea what Jax’s last name is.

 

“Morrow.  But you can call me Gemma.”

 

“I’m sorry, Gemma, for upsetting you.  Your son can be…”  He figures it won’t really be much of an apology if he finishes the sentence, so he lets it go.

 

“He can be a total asshole, Dean, but he’s usually got a good reason.  What’d you do to him?”

 

Dean must look as pole-axed as he feels because Jax laughs a little and says, “Easy, mom.  I sort of had it coming.”

 

The admission makes Dean reassess what little he’d decided about Jax.

 

“’course, he was bein’ a dick, too.”

 

Dean has to concede that it’s true enough, lets out a little humored breath of air.

 

“Why don’t you boys sit down?  Juice, bring Tig to the table.  I’ll make some breakfast.”

 

“We don’t have time for that today, Ma.  Gotta meet Hale.”

 

Gemma looks at Jax and then nods to herself, like she’s decided something.  “Take Dean.”

 

If Jax was planning to protest, it dies on his lips at the expression on Gemma’s face.  Dean doesn’t blame the guy.  He wouldn’t try to argue with her, either.

 

So Jax nods toward the door, and Dean falls in three steps behind him, and they’re out into the morning half-light.  The sky is full of red dust this morning, hovering over the rooftops of Charming in an arcing dome.  Dean knows from experience that everywhere else, that dust is choking, sight-obscuring, impossible to survive without breathing gear.

 

“Woah,” he breathes, stopping to take it in.

 

Jax glances up at the sky like he’s just noticing it.  “Yeah, that happens.”

 

Dean’s laugh is not even remotely humorous.

 

“You…” Jax starts, obviously a little pissed again.

  
Dean holds up a placating hand.  “Look, it’s gonna take me a little while to get used to this, okay?  I’m not being ungrateful.  I’m just…”  He waves his hand, unable to find a word that encapsulates the sum of his experiences that led him to this point.

 

Jax comes back, closing a little of the distance between them.

 

“You think I don’t wonder if there weren’t more I could have saved?  People I could’ve helped?  We tried, man.  We rode out every day for months, risked our own lives, lost some good guys.  We got two out there now on a med run who probably aren’t coming back.  But what good would it have done anyone—least of all the people countin’ on us here in Charming—if we didn’t come home?”

 

And that’s it, right there.  That word:  Home.  Because Dean’s never had a home, not a place he could call that.  He had the front seat of the Impala, had a father and a brother, called anywhere they were together home.

 

Dean stares hard at the cracked concrete of the apron in front of the garage.  Wanting to be off this topic before it opens up the rotten, wormy corpse of his past, Dean grasps at the first thing he can think of.

  
“So if you’re Morrow, who’s Teller?”

 

He looks up just in time to see Jax taken a little off-guard, and he files that away for future use.

 

“I’m Teller.  My dad started this place.  Started the club, too.  My mom married my dad’s partner, Clay Morrow, after my dad died.”

 

“Demon?” 

 

“What?”

 

“Did a demon kill your dad?”  In the old days, that would have been a personal question, not to mention insane.  Now that the apocalypse is upon them, though, it’s more like shop talk.  At least for Dean.

 

For Jax, it seems to be another story.  He’s got this look on his face, part confusion, part disbelief, part something else…pity, maybe.

  
Dean doesn’t like it, anyway.

  
“What?”  And yeah, it’s belligerent, and yeah, he’s going down the same road that led to violence just a few minutes ago, but damned if he isn’t tired of this guy looking at him like he’s strange.

 

There are _dragons_ in fucking _Idaho_.

 

In the big picture, Dean is positively normal.

 

“An eighteen wheeler killed my father.”

 

“Huh.”  It’s a thoughtful sound, and Jax gives him another mash-up of looks.

 

Dean elaborates.  “My dad, my brother, and I got creamed by an eighteen wheeler once.  ‘course, the driver was possessed by a demon.”

 

Jax makes a sound that Dean at first thinks is derision.  But when it lengthens and bursts out louder, bouncing off the lowering sky, off the buildings around them, he realizes the guy is laughing. 

 

“What?” He says again, this time a little bewildered.  He didn’t think it was all that funny.

 

“You, man.  Your life is fucked up.”

 

Dean looks at the blood dust hovering twenty feet over their heads in a sun-blotting dome of doom.  Looks at the barricade of tires and hoods at the entrance to the yard.  Looks at the reaper painted on Jax’s cut.

 

“My life?  Dude, it’s the fucking apocalypse.  Everyone’s life is fucked up.”

 

“No, I’m pretty sure yours sucks worse.”

 

And Dean’s got to concede that that’s probably true.  Which makes him laugh a little bit himself.  The Winchesters always did have fuck-all for luck.

 

“So did your dad and brother die?”

 

And like that, whatever humor he saw in the situation drains out his feet while his heart stutters painfully in his chest and his throat starts to close up.

  
He doesn’t know what expression he’s wearing, but by the look that crosses Jax’s face as he sees it, it must be pretty bad.

 

Jax frowns, turns his eyes down, shakes his head.  “Hey, I’m sorry, man.  That’s none of my business.  I didn’t mean—“

 

“Yeah,” Dean says.  “Yeah, they died.”

 

And he’s not lying.  Not precisely.  Dad’s dead.  Sam, too.  If Jax thinks Dean means they died in the wreck, well…what harm is there in that?  And if it keeps Jax from asking more questions about Dean’s family, all the better. 

 

Like he’s offering it for barter, Jax says, voice quiet, “I had a brother, too.  He died when he we were kids.  Heart.”

 

Dean takes that in, takes in the stillness in the other man, the way his face has smoothed out.  Ironic that he should look so young when he’s doing his best to put away what the world has worn him down with.

 

Gemma was right about them, Dean reflects.  They have a lot in common.  Suddenly, he’s more afraid than he has been in a long, long time.

 

“So, we gonna see this Hale guy, or are we gonna stand here having Hallmark moments all day.”

 

Jax laughs.  “Prick.”

 

“Bitch,” Dean returns, knee-jerk.  He hides the hitch in his step as it hits him, what he’s just said, how it felt leaving him.  Like Jax was familiar in a way he shouldn’t be, yet or ever. 

 

They arrive at Jax’s bike.  Dean takes one look at the bitch seat and shakes his head.  “I’m not riding bitch.”

 

Jax grins, points to a bike further down the row, a big hog, clean lines, “Sons” stenciled in neat blue letters on the gas tank.  “You know how to ride that?”

 

Dean grins back.  “Not a thing made I can’t ride.”  He means it just as dirty as it sounds.

 

Jax’s grin changes.  It’s a subtle shift, but Dean sees it, lets Jax see that he sees it, too.

 

The brain bucket gunning at him breaks the tension of the moment.  “Keep up,” Jax says, swinging his leg over the seat and backing it away from the others.

 

Dean puts the helmet on without fastening it and makes it to his borrowed ride just as Jax roars past him, shit-eating grin on his face.  Dean curses, kicks up the stand, mounts and backs the bike out of the line-up, not without some effort.  It’s been awhile since he’s ridden one of these, since Santa Barbara, he thinks, or maybe Monterey. 

 

Still, the old adage about bike-riding is true, and soon enough he’s opening up the throttle and feeling the big engine surge between his thighs. 

 

It feels good.  Not J.C. good, but still…

 

Jax is waiting for him a couple of blocks up.  “Good?” He shouts over the twin idles of the bikes.

 

Dean gives a thumbs-up, and they’re off, moving loud but sedately through the tree-shaded streets of Charming.  And Dean has to admit, it lives up to its name, even in—or maybe, especially because of—these apocalyptic times.

 

Main Street is like something out of a Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had included motorcycle gangs and blood dust obscuring the sun.

 

In front of the big plate glass of an old-fashioned barber shop sits a boxy Jeep with the ubiquitous cop seal.  Jax doesn’t stop, though, just slows down enough to nod at the cop inside and then glides past and pulls up to a café a few doors down. 

 

“Miriam makes great coffee.”

 

Dean manages to stop himself from making an embarrassing sound as he enters the café and takes in the scent of doughnuts and real coffee.

 

There’s a brief scuffle as Dean realizes that one of them will have to sit with his back to the door and neither of them is interested in taking the hit.  They settle for sitting at the breakfast counter, one empty round stool between them.

 

Dean narrowly escapes utter humiliation when Miriam herself pours him a cup of nectar of the gods.

 

He gives up all semblance of pride when he swallows the first scalding mouthful. 

 

Jax is wearing a smirk that already Dean is coming to find annoying—as it’s intended to be, he’s sure.  “You okay?  Do we need more napkins?”

 

“Shut up,” he mumbles around a mouthful of cinnamon doughnut. 

 

The bell on the door jingles and they swivel in unison to see the cop coming in.

 

“Deputy Chief Hale, Dean Winchester.”

 

Dean puts down the doughnut, wipes his hand on his jeans, offers it to the man.

  
Hale has a firm, definite grip and assessing eyes that seem to be cataloguing Dean’s qualities as he takes him in.

 

Miriam slides a cup of coffee in front of him, and Hale gives her a smile and a genuine “Thank you.”  The woman beams back at him.

  
Yep.  Fucking Norman Rockwell.  Dean half expects to see a kid with a wagon and a Dalmatian wander by on the sidewalk outside.

 

“Chibs said you wanted to see me about a supply run.”

 

Hale’s suddenly all gravity, nodding over his coffee, eyes serious.  “We’re low on canned meat and fish.  We’ve got enough eggs—Lacy’s chickens are laying—and milk is holding steady.  Roger says the herd’s a little smaller, but he’s got a few calves on the way.  But we can’t risk slaughtering any of the pigs; there’s an illness running through them, might make the meat bad, and anyway, we need to keep as many of them alive as we can.”

 

Dean watches Jax, sees how seriously the man takes his responsibility.  He’s listening to Hale with his full attention, and Dean can see him thinking over what he’s hearing, making plans in his head.

 

Fifteen minutes later, when they’re still talking about feed lots and crop yields, Dean’s wishing there was a crossword puzzle or stray newspaper.  Hell, he’d settle for three year old obits.  Anything but this—

 

“—you think you’re up for it?”

 

The silence that succeeds the question suggests that it’s awaiting a response from Dean, who brings himself back to the conversation to find both men looking at him.

 

“Uh…yeah, yeah sure.  What are we talking about?”

 

Jax frowns a little, while Hale gives good blank face.

 

“You want to take a run with me up to Lodi, see if we can’t get some of these supplies?”

 

Dean thinks about it.  “Isn’t Stockton bigger?  And closer?”

 

Jax shakes his head.  “We’ve cleared it out of most of the shit we could use.”

 

“Besides, there’s a prison there.”  Hale says this like it should mean something to Dean.  It doesn’t.

 

Jax sees his confusion.  “Prisons were hit pretty hard by the virus.  Almost like they were targeted.  The inmates who are still alive are…”  He lets it go, but Dean can imagine…doesn’t need to, in fact.  Been there, et cetera. 

 

“Lodi it is,” he says, faux-hearty.  Truth is, he’s tired of running, would like to just sit still someplace where being static won’t get him killed. 

 

Guess he’s got to earn his keep, though, and anyway, maybe it’ll give him a chance to figure out why he’s supposed to be here.

 

He ignores the voice in his head whispering about being alone on the open road with Jax. 

 

Business and breakfast done, they depart, Hale nodding to Dean, shaking Jax’s hand.

  
“We’ll leave at daybreak tomorrow, try to be back by Wednesday.” 

 

Dean breaks in:  “Four days?  Lodi’s what…ten miles, tops?”

 

“There’s a lot of bad shit between here and there.  And it’ll take us time to find the things we need once we’re there.”

 

Figuring there’ll be time to talk logistics later, and not really wanting to do it in front of a cop, no matter how decent a guy he seems, Dean just nods like he’s satisfied and moves to his bike.

 

“Keep up,” he calls back over his shoulder to Jax, who’s walked Hale to the Jeep.  Jax breaks away with a wave at Hale, hops on his bike.  Dean’s already half a block away.

 

They cut and dodge back to the clubhouse and both are laughing and a little breathless when they pull in.

 

They’re greeted by Half-Sack, who’s wiping grease off his hands.  The Mustang up on the lift in the first bay explains it.

 

“We got a run?”

 

“Dean and I’ll handle it.  Any word from Hap or Ziggy?”

 

Half-Sack shakes his head.  “It’s been two days, man.”

 

No one says what they’re all thinking.

 

Sack returns to his work and Dean follows Jax back to the clubhouse. 

 

“Sorry about your guys.”

 

“Brothers,” Jax corrects.  “They’re my brothers.”

 

Dean nods, head going where he wishes it wouldn’t, and he catches the door as Jax goes through.  “I’ll catch up.  Gotta get some shit from the car.”

 

Jax waves over his shoulder and keeps walking.

 

He doesn’t need anything from the front seat, but Dean slides inside anyway, rests his hands on the wheel, closes his eyes, starts drumming out the bass beat to “Enter Sandman.”  When the pounding of his heart has eased, Dean gets out, grabs his gear from the trunk, his sawed-off from the rear floor where Opie had left it, and heads back toward the clubhouse.

 

The “Sons of Anarchy” sign seems to loom over him, somehow ominous in the bloody half-light of midday.  Shaking off a sense that things are slipping out of his control, Dean enters, letting his eyes adjust.

 

From ahead, down the long hall, he hears laughter, glasses clinking, smells bacon.  He slows his steps to listen to the rumble of Jax’s voice, which he can already pick out of the raucous din.

 

Another misgiving hits him, but Dean swallows it down.

 

Brothers are Sons here, he reminds himself, Sons brothers. 

 

He doesn’t want any more brothers.  He lost the only one who mattered.  But if he can be a part of the Sons, he guesses that’s okay.  They aren’t really brothers.  It’s not the same thing, he tells himself. 

 

For once, the voice in his head doesn’t correct him.

 

*****

 

 _No one takes the measure of a man until he’s tested by fire.  What a man does under fire—or while burning—is a testament to how he’ll behave when life is merciful, which it rarely is.  The way a man conducts himself when his life is being shortened to the fractions of seconds between rounds suggests how much he values life and what he’ll do to keep it.  There’s nothing truer to test a man:  not family, nor loyalty, nor love._  (Book of Johns 22:3-7)

 

“I don’t like it.”

 

Ope’s reaction is predictable, but it still pisses Jax off.  They’re at the table in church alone, door slid shut for privacy.  From outside, the muted sounds of men laughing and the crack of pool balls tell Jax that Dean is introducing someone to his latest party trick.  Guy’s good with balls, Jax has to admit.

 

“Look, I’m not going steady with the guy.”

 

“No, just to Lodi.  Without protection.”

 

“Guy can handle himself.”

 

“I’m sure he can.”  And there’s a wealth of implication in Opie’s voice that Jax thinks he should just let go. 

 

Of course, he doesn’t.

  
“You got somethin’ to say, Ope, say it.”

 

“I want to know which head you’re thinking with, is all.  Somethin’ happens to you, this club—hell, this town—is screwed.”

 

Jax shakes his head, twisted smirk on his face.  “I’m not that special, Ope.  You’d do fine without me.  But nothin’s gonna happen to me.  Dean’s survived since the apocalypse started without help.  I think he can handle a grocery run to Lodi.”

 

Ope makes a disgusted sound.  “You’re not listening.”

 

Jax pins him with a look.  “I’m listenin’ _and_ I’m hearin’ you, Ope.  You’re afraid he’s gonna take second spot, right?  Worried I’m going to start favoring him?”

 

“I’m worried you’re going to start fucking him.”

 

And there it is, the thing they never talk about.

  
Jax goes still, his eyes on Opie but not seeing him, face tight with holding a neutral expression while his insides rearrange themselves unpleasantly.

 

Then, that internal voice says, _Fuck it_ , and pushes him past the discomfort, past the worry and sense of self and into the silent whiteness of immediate action.  When he’s fighting, it’s a quiet place, cold and still, where nothing exists outside of the blinding need to act. 

 

Here and now, that translates to Jax fixing his eyes firmly on his best friend, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and saying, in a measured voice, like he’s remarking on the weather:

 

“I’ll fuck whoever I want whenever I want to, Ope.  Not you, not my mother, not anyone gets to tell me that.  You got a problem with me and Dean that doesn’t involve where I put my dick, you say it.  Otherwise, step off.  It’s none of your business.”

 

For a split second Opie wears an expression akin to betrayal, and then he drops back into the stoic grimace he favors.  The big man shrugs, like Jax didn’t just remake the world in a different image, and nods, except there’s really no concession in the gesture.  It’s just something to do.

 

“We don’t know enough about him, Jax.  You’re risking your life for something that’s not worth it.”

 

And a part of Jax agrees, the reasoned part that has led this club through hell and back home again.  But another part, one he can’t name or quite understand, says he’s got to trust Dean. 

 

But Ope deserves more than what Jax has given him here.

 

“Look, this isn’t about getting lucky.  It’s about Tig knowing Dean was coming.  It’s about the guy at the gate letting Dean in.  Hell, Ope, you saw my mom last night.  She touched him and she was back, man, from wherever she went after Clay died.  That’s gotta mean something.”

 

But his VP is shaking his head.  “I don’t buy this magic shit, Jax.  I told you that already.  Tig’s untrustworthy.  He’s got his own agenda.  And your mother…”

 

Jax snorts.  “Yeah, explain that.”

 

Ope’s shrug means he’s giving in on that point, at least for now.

 

“As for the lightning… So he’s not evil.  Doesn’t mean he’s good.  I’m tellin’ you, Jax, somethin’ doesn’t sit right about him.”

 

That might be true. 

 

“Only one way to find out.”

 

At that, Ope makes a sound, half scorn, half exhaustion.  “You’re more like Clay than you’ll ever admit,” he says as he gets out of his chair.

 

Jax nods at the table, takes a drag of his cigarette.  “Send Dean in when he’s done with his game.”

 

Opie doesn’t answer, but a few minutes later, Dean comes to the door.

 

“You wanted something, your highness?”

 

“Shut the door.” 

 

Maybe it’s his tone of voice, but Jax sees Dean change his expression, do as he’s told, take the seat Opie vacated a few minutes before.

  
“What’s up?”  Dean’s voice is carefully devoid of any real feeling.

 

“Who are you, really?”

 

Dean groans.  “Are we back to this already?  Ope tell you I can’t be trusted?”

 

Jax gives him a quelling look.  “Answer the question.”

 

“Dean Winchester.  30. I like long walks on the beach, anything by Led Zeppelin, and driving my car as fast as I can on open country roads.  Oh, and hunting and killing every evil thing I can find.”

 

Jax waits, eyes bright with anger, mouth twisted.

 

To his credit, Dean doesn’t so much as twitch.

 

Eventually, though, the hunter shifts in his seat and sighs.  “Fine.  What do you want me to say?  I had a father, John, and a brother, Sam, and they’re dead.  I’ve spent the last two and a half years killing what I can and running from what I can’t.  I came here because a prophecy told me to.  End of story.  Really, there’s nothing all that mysterious about me.”

 

“What about your mother?”

 

“What about her?”

 

Jax hears the edge there, pries away at it.  “Your mother still alive?  Where is she?”

 

This time, it’s Dean’s face that’s full of heat, eyes sharp with it.  “She’s dead.  She died when I was a kid.”

 

Before he finishes drawing the breath he was going to use to ask, Dean adds, “Demon.”

 

Like that, his anger dissipates, and he looks up to find Dean looking right back at him.

 

“Your life really does suck.”

 

“Most of the time.”

 

“You got anyone left?”

 

Dean’s hands splay outward like he’s letting go of something that’s going to float away.  It’s no answer, really, but Jax knows what he means.

 

“You got anything you want to ask me?”

 

Dean’s quiet for a span of breaths, and Jax braces himself for a grilling.  But when he finally speaks, Dean says only, “Can anyone here help me fix the suspension on a ’67 Impala?”  
  


Jax grins, admiring the guy’s bluff.  “I think Ope knows a thing or two.”

 

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen.  No way I’m standing under two tons of Detroit steel while he controls the lift.”

 

Jax laughs.  “He wouldn’t mess up the garage floor like that.  Blood’s a bitch to get up off of concrete.”

 

“Oh, of course.  I suppose he favors a couple of rounds to the back of the head.”

 

Trying hard not to give anything away of how close Dean is to the truth of things, he forces a laugh and then sobers and changes the subject.

 

“So Lodi has these creatures…”

 

It sounds weird even saying the word, like they’re living in some fucking bullshit fairy tale, but Jax manages to get it out.

 

“They seem like fairies, I guess—wings, maybe three feet high.  Fast little fuckers.  They sort of swarm.  Do a lot of damage.  Can take a guy off a bike at 65 miles an hour.”

 

Dean starts nodding halfway through the description.  “Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about.  Hang on a minute.  Let me get the book.”

  
Before Jax can ask, Dean’s out the door.  Bobby comes to the opening and peeks in.  “Everythin’ alright?”

 

“Yeah, we’re cool.  Just layin’ out the run.”

 

Bobby nods.  “I get you anything?”

 

“Nah, Bobby, but thanks.  You guys take it easy, huh?  You’ve earned the rest.”

 

From somewhere behind Bobby, Rita giggles and Kerry squeals.

 

Bobby gives Jax a wicked grin, licks his lips.  “I don’t think rest is on the menu, but easy’s definitely on tap.”

 

Jax laughs and waves Bobby off just as Dean returns with a leather-bound book in his hand and closes the door behind him.  The sounds of high times die away to muffled suggestions of a better place than here.

 

Dean doesn’t sit down right away, doesn’t put the book down, either, just stands there like he’s waiting for Jax to say something.  Since Jax isn’t sure what that something is, the silence grows uncomfortably.

 

Finally, Dean lets out a sigh like he’s about to give away something precious, sits down, and places the book carefully in front of him.

 

He slides a practiced finger under the snap, turns the pages inside gingerly.  Jax can see that the book is ring-bound, some of the pages encased in plastic sleeves, others hanging on by a single, ragged hole.  There are stains he can see from where he sits, halfway down and across the table from Dean, places where pieces have been torn out, thick black ink blotting names and figures.

 

At last, Dean taps a page and makes a victory sound.  “I thought so.  Imps.  The little fuckers are probably imps.  Got red eyes, fangs?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Imps.”  Dean smoothes the pages down, slides the book across the table to Jax.  The journal entry is dated, handwritten in strong, neat letters, the picture sketched out in pencil that someone went over with a regular black pen.  Staring back at him is a pretty good representation of the swarm of shits that had harassed them every time they went to or through Lodi.

 

 _They live in highest concentrations around the cave or sinkhole that provides them passage to and from hell_ , he reads.

 

“Hell?” He echoes, looking at Dean.

 

“Yeah.  Gates usually need opening.  I mean, they don’t just happen.  Usually.  But after the apocalypse kicked off, a lot more of ‘em opened up.  You should see the size of the one in St. Paul.”

 

“You do this?”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “No.  It was my dad’s.  He kept track of everything he found out from the day my mother died until the day he died.”

 

Jax is tempted to flip to the front, to find evidence of Dean’s childhood in those early pages.  But he doesn’t do it.  From the way Dean’s watching him, he knows that this is a test of some kind.  He wants to pass it more than maybe he should.

 

“The later stuff is yours?”

 

“Yeah, but I’m not much for drawing.  Sam was the artist in the family.”

 

It isn’t Jax’s imagination that Dean’s voice gets higher then, like his throat tightens even mentioning his brother. 

 

“So, is this blood?”

 

It’s a deft move on Dean’s part, a better distraction than the man could’ve been expecting.

  
Jax follows Dean’s eyes to the Reaper carved into the tabletop, to the pinkish stains along the scythe and down the folds of his robe.

 

He nods.

 

He doesn’t want to talk about this.  But then he remembers who he’s talking to and thinks maybe he has no choice.

 

“You ever see a guy ripped apart by a cloud of black smoke?”

 

Dean’s eyes widen a little and he closes one hand spasmodically.  Jax would bet good money that the other man doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

 

“ _Ripped_ apart?”

 

The way he asks it suggests that black smoke isn’t the oddity in the equation but rather its behavior.

 

“One minute Clay was sitting here,” Jax gestures at the always-empty head chair, “Talking about building up our armory, the next he was convulsing in his chair, babbling and clawing at his throat with his fingers.  We thought he was having some kind of fit.  But then…light started to come out from behind his eyes, and black smoke started to seep out of the corners of his mouth.  Then the screaming started…”

 

Jax doesn’t want to tell the rest.  The desperate scramble to hold Clay down, the way his step-father’s skin burned their hands, the way they couldn’t look directly at him once his eyes started to melt away, the light piercing the room like lasers, leaving them with searing blank spots in their vision.

 

Couldn’t talk about the sounds Clay made, the way he tore at his own skin, like he was trying to get something out of his chest.

 

The way he cried like a baby when his throat gave way and he couldn’t scream anymore.

 

“It felt like it lasted for days.”

 

He doesn’t realize he’s said this last part until Dean says, just as quietly, “I’m sorry.”

 

Jax nods, clears his throat.  “You ever heard of anything like that?”

 

It comes out like a challenge, one punctuated by Jax shoving the book back across the table at Dean.

 

Dean’s reflexes are quick, and he keeps the book from falling to the floor, gives Jax a reproachful look, like maybe he’s just done something sacrilege.

 

They sit like that, saying nothing, as ugly memories take up all the space between them. 

 

Finally, though, Dean says, “I think I know what might’ve happened.”

 

Jax isn’t sure he wants to hear.  What if it tells him more than he ever wanted to discover about his step-dad?  What if it means knowing how he himself is going to die?  Still, it’s his responsibility to find out what happened to Clay.  He owes it to his mother, never mind to the club itself.

 

“The white light, the way you describe it, that can only be an angel.  And the black smoke is a definite sign of demonic possession.  It sounds to me like an angel and a demon were duking it out inside your step-dad for control of him.”

 

It takes him a minute to process that.  Then, “Why?”

 

Dean takes his own time in answering.

 

“If I had to speculate, I’d say it has something to do with Charming being protected by the big guy upstairs.  Did Clay die before the first of the seals were broken?”

 

“I don’t know nothin’ about seals, but I can tell you he died before the Colorado turned red for real.”

 

The famous river running red with blood was one of the earliest signs of the apocalypse.

 

“Then I’d say the angels and demons were trying to get ahold of control of Charming, figuring it was going to be the last battleground.  Whoever held it would have the advantage.  But it didn’t work out.  They couldn’t keep control of Clay, or they got too bitchy fighting over elbow room.  Whatever.  They ripped him apart.”

 

“Then why aren’t I dead, too?  Why didn’t they just go through every one of us like that?”

 

Dean considers, finally blows out a frustrated breath.  “I don’t know.  Maybe they ran out of time?  Maybe there was a deadline or something for when Charming got its force field.  You got any idea of when that might have started?”

 

“Oh, yeah,” Jax says grimly, remembering the night when a third of Charming’s population was fried in their beds by lightning out of a clear night sky.

 

He gives Dean the run-down in as neutral a tone as he can manage.  A lot of good people died that night.

  
“But none of you?  I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t exactly strike me as good Christian soldiers.”

 

Jax gives a short laugh.  “I don’t know, man.  I’ve been asking myself that ever since.  Gotta be a reason we’re God’s chosen, though.  I figure maybe we’re the answer to the Hells Angels.”

 

Notoriously, in the days following the first signs of the apocalypse, the entire club, from coast to coast, had gone on a rampage of blood and rapine that was then-unimagined in scale and scope.  Later, it became pretty obvious that they’d been possessed en masse, but by then, it was far too late.  There weren’t enough exorcists left to do the job, and anyway, the Church had other problems.

  
Like dragons in fucking Idaho.

 

And a rogue pope rising out of the East.

 

“Maybe you just got lucky on the timing.”  But Dean doesn’t sound like he entirely believes his own explanation, and Jax isn’t comfortable with the “maybe” in that sentence.  Still, he guesses there’s not much more than can do for now.

 

He changes the subject again.  “Got some anti-imp spray in that car of yours?”

 

They spend some time talking the finer points of flamethrowers, Dean hooting in excitement to hear that they have several genuine U.S. military models in their armory, and then move on to the logistics of a grocery run to Lodi.

 

Jax gets out the map, shows Dean their route, talks about where the best stores are for scouting supplies.  Dean asks questions, good ones, about blind corners and dead ends, and Jax can’t help but admire the quickness of the hunter’s mind, the way he’s three steps ahead before Jax has time to explain everything.

 

Dean asks, “So where’s sanctuary?”

 

Jax gives Dean the eyebrow.

 

“Seriously, you guys don’t know about sanctuary?  Holy ground?  You got a freakin’ prophet of the apocalypse on your payroll and you don’t know this shit?”

 

Dean’s tone is incredulous, and it strikes a deep note of unease in Jax, who has always had his suspicions about their ex-Enforcer and his intentions for using his “gift” for his own purposes.

 

Knowing better than to admit that potential weakness to Dean, who is, after all, still an outsider, never mind what his gut keeps trying to tell him, Jax just says, “Tell me,” like Dean’s jerking him around.

 

“You want to talk to your _brothers_ like that, fine.  But I’m not your bitch, Jax.  Why don’t you stop treating me like I’m going to get down on all fours for you every time you bark.”

 

“You’re right.  I’m sorry.”  And he is.  Sorry that he took his impatience at Tig out on Dean.  Sorry he let that impatience show, too.  Something about this guy just winds him up.

 

“To answer your question,” Dean accepts the apology by ignoring it, “Some churches offer sanctuary.  Not all of ‘em.  And not always the same denomination.  There’s an awesome UU church in the basement of an old shoe factory outside of Dubuque.  There’s a tiny little A.M.E. church in Lincoln, PA.  It’s not the size or stripe that matters, I guess.  It’s something about the way they were blessed?  No one’s ever been able to say for sure.  Bobby speculated that it was the individual intentions of the congregation that made the places holy over time, but I don’t know if I buy that.  Anyway, there could be a church in Lodi that’ll give us a safe place to stay overnight.”

 

Jax had indicated earlier that scavenging took at least two full days, given the sparseness of the pickings and the likelihood of interference by demonic and other evil forces.

 

He should be asking questions about how to tell if a church is holy or whatever, but instead he asks, “Who’s Bobby?”

 

Dean looks a little surprised, like he hadn’t realized he’d mentioned the guy’s name.  Then the sadness comes, just at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and Jax wishes he hadn’t asked.  After all, Dean had already said he had no one left.

 

“He was…family.”  It’s clear Dean’s not saying any more on the subject, and Jax is happy to let it go.  He’s tired of sorrow.

 

The conversation shifts, then, to finding out what churches in Lodi might have the right mojo, and Jax calls Juice in to see what the kid can find out.  Even without computers at his command, the guy’s pretty good with ferreting out information.  He heads to the library with a smile.

  
“That guy’s too happy,” Dean notes, an echo of a smile on his face.

  
Jax gives Dean a knowing look.  “Pretty, too.”

 

Suddenly, the other man’s eyes are on Jax, deliberately fixed not on his eyes but on his lips, which are turned up in a knowing smirk.

 

“Takes one to know one,” Dean says at last, and his voice is a little rough.

 

Jax’s smirk turns lewd.  “This coming from a guy with lips that could suck road slag off a tailpipe.”

 

“Eat me.”

 

“You first.”

 

The look they share then is definite, no suggestion or innuendo left, and Jax feels himself growing hard in his jeans.

 

“Am I interrupting something, boys?” Gemma asks from the door, which she apparently opened without either of them noticing.  She’s holding a tray with sandwiches and chips and two unopened bottles of beer.

 

By the way Dean starts in his seat and whips around to look at Gemma, Jax knows Dean is in the same state, and that makes him feel a whole lot better about the zipper digging into his dick.

 

“You missed lunch, honey,” She says sweetly, like butter wouldn’t melt.  But Jax knows all too well what the gleam in her eye means, and he groans inwardly at the shit he’s going to have to take from her for the foreseeable future.

  
Given that yesterday at this time she wasn’t capable of anything like teasing him, he finds he can only really be grateful, even if it means plenty of embarrassment.

 

“Thank you, ma’am,” Dean says, his deference obviously the product of guilt.

 

She swats him on the shoulder.  “It’s Gemma, Dean.”

 

“Yes, ma’—Yes, Gemma.  Thanks.”

 

“Thanks, Mom,” Jax says, feeling his cheek heat up with the wink she drops on him as she leans over to put his food down and then kiss him on the cheek.

 

“I’ve got to go out for awhile, Jax.  Bobby said you had my keys?”

 

Jax takes in his mom’s face, searches it for a second before deciding.  “Yeah.  They’re on my dresser.”

 

“Okay, hon.  You need anything?  I’m going to Jett’s.”  The local grocery is stocked with canned goods and whatever fresh food is available.  Dan and Jenny Jett run the place and keep track of rations in a ledger next to the dead register.

 

“Naw, I’m good.”

 

“Dean?”  Gemma turns to Dean, whose eyes indicate a kind of hopeful confusion. 

 

“No chance I could get Spaghetti-o’s, is there?”

 

Gemma pats him on the shoulder as she passes.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

When she’s gone, door once again closed firmly behind her, Jax gives Dean a questioning look.

 

The hunter is halfway through his second bite of sandwich when he catches on to Jax’s silence.

 

“What?” he says with his mouth full.  “I like ‘em.”

 

Jax laughs.  “Whatever, man.  I’m just sayin’, what’re you, like, twelve?”

 

If a shadow crosses Dean’s eyes as he turns away to busy himself with a slug of beer, Jax pretends he doesn’t see it.

 

There are some secrets he figures he’d rather never unveil.

 

He only hopes whatever it is that Dean’s hiding doesn’t kill them all in the end.

 

Guess he’ll find out for himself come tomorrow.

 

*****

 

 _The people you love are weapons in the hands of the enemy.  Never forget that._ (Book of Johns 19:3-4)

 

Dean finds Jax on the roof.

 

The indistinct sounds of a wild party growing wilder filter up through the exhaust shaft Jax is sitting near. 

 

Dean pauses at the top of the ladder, assessing.

 

“Can I come up?”

 

Jax seems to consider.  He’s smoking a cigarette—it was the odor of it that told Dean where to look, in fact—and has a big book in his lap, half-closed around a finger holding the page.

 

The cigarette waves him ahead, and Dean climbs up, asphalt roofing crunching under his feet.

 

There’s an upended bucket near where Jax is sitting, and Dean kicks it a little further away, settles down.  His knee protests, and he tries to hide the way he has to stretch it out.

 

“Accident?” Jax asks.

  
Dean should’ve known Jax’d notice.  The guy notices a lot.  A lot more than Dean is comfortable with, for sure.

 

Dean nods.  “Got thrown around by a couple of uber-werewolves in Cleveland.”

 

Jax lets out a chuff of breath.

 

“What?”

 

“You ever cut yourself shaving or slam your hand in the car door?”

 

Dean laughs back.  Guy’s got a point.

 

“What’re you reading?”  In the dim illumination of a security light on a pole parallel to where they’re sitting, Dean can’t make out any features of the book, only that it seems to be typewritten pages in a binder of some kind.

 

Jax looks at the binder like he’d forgotten it was there.  Dean knows better. Then the biker drops his cigarette, grinds it out with his sneaker and flips the book to the front, handing it to Dean.  Jax flicks his lighter and holds it over the page. 

 

 _The Life and Death of Sam Crow: How the Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way_ , Dean reads. 

 

“John Thomas Teller.  That your dad?”  
  


Jax nods as he lets the lighter go out.  It flares again briefly to light another cigarette.

 

Dean’s not sure what to say.  He knows what his dad’s journal means to him, how it’s one of the tangible pieces of the life he used to have that he might die rather than let go.

 

“Sam Crow?”

 

“Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club,” Jax answers, voice inflectionless.  “But it’s also an allegory,” he adds, and he sounds distracted.  Dean suddenly feels like he’s intruding.

 

He holds the book out.  “I guess I should head back down—“

 

“No.  Stay.”  He waves the cigarette around, making glowing orange hieroglyphics against the almost starless sky.

 

“My dad started the club to be something more than just bikes and pussy.  He wanted it to be a place to escape from the way the world takes things out of you.  And when it started to go wrong…”

 

Another wave.  Dean wishes he could interpret the sigils carved into the darkness by that cherry tip.

 

“He foresaw this, you know?”

 

This gets Dean’s closer attention.  Personal reflections always made him itchy, but this feels more like revelation of a different kind entirely.

 

“The end of the world?”

 

The tip of Jax’s cigarette bobs an affirmative.

 

“Like, broken seals and demons and Lucifer and shit?”

 

Jax coughs out a humorless laugh.  “Not quite.  He said it was going to end in blood, though.  He might have meant just the club, but there are a lot of times when he talks more like a prophet than a mechanic, you know?”

 

It’s Dean’s turn to cough, but there’s no attempt at a laugh, just a tightness in his throat he needs to clear away.

 

“Yeah, I do.  My dad was a mechanic, too, before my mom.  Before everything.”

 

“The Sons of John,” Jax intones.  In the solemn heaviness of the dark, it’s like an invocation.

 

“You think the prophecy is about us?”

 

“Yeah, I do.”  There’s no uncertainty in Jax’s voice.  He might not trust Tig, but he knows the truth when he hears it.

 

“So is there more to it?”

 

Jax drops the cigarette, crushes it under foot, laces his hands together between his knees.  Dean’s still holding the book, resting against his bad knee, cover closed now.

 

Jax nods to it, and Dean hands it over.  In the glow of the guttering orange flame of his lighter, he searches something out, and then he reads aloud, finger tracing along beneath the line to keep his place in the uncertain light.

 

“My sons mean more to me than anything.  More than this club.  More than my country.  More than the brothers I’d die for tomorrow.  What my sons carry into the future is what I give them, burdens and gifts, both.  I must make them survivors because there is an evil rising in this land that will smother all good if it can, and my sons must be the ones to stop it.”

 

Dean snorts.  “That’s not too much to ask of a couple of kids.”  His own bitterness has long ago worn down to resignation.

 

Jax’s wound is newer.  Dean can hear the raw edges of it in his reply.  “This is the gift he left me.  A book of mystic shit written in sixties hippy code that’s harder to translate than most of the crap Tig spews.”

 

The book hits the roof with a flat thwap that carries out over the yard below.

 

“You think either of them knew what they were leaving us with?”

 

Dean knows the answer to that, or is pretty sure he does, at least where his father’s concerned.  That’s not something he’s going to talk about, though.

 

He shrugs. “Maybe.  Or maybe they were just doing the best they could under shitty conditions.”

 

They ponder that in silence for awhile.

 

Dean breaks it.  “Fubar, Dad called it.”

 

“Fucked up beyond all recognition,” Jax echoes, something like a laugh but darker coming with it.  “Your dad infantry?”

 

“Marines.”

 

“Boo-yah,” Jax laughs, for real this time.  “Vietnam?”

 

Dean snorts, whispers, “Jesus, we _are_ the Sons of John,” rubs a tired hand over his face.  “This is fucked up.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“So what’s the rest of the prophecy?”

 

By the way the other man stills, Dean knows it’s going to be bad, and fuck it if he has even an ounce of energy left to brace himself.

  
From below, a burst of raucous sound tells them a door’s been opened.  A woman’s voice, slurred with drink, warbles, “Deeeeeeaaaaaaan,” out over the darkened yard.

  
“Your maiden calls,” Jax deadpans.

 

“A hero’s work is never done,” Dean answers, mock-solemn.  But he doesn’t get up.  She calls again, and then the door closes on the noise below, reducing it to the steady bass-line of whatever’s on the jukebox and the loudest voices raised in revelry.

 

“You think we are?” Jax asks, after it’s obvious Dean’s not going anywhere.

 

“Are what?”

 

“Heroes?”

 

“Hell, yeah.”  He doesn’t hesitate on that, has had plenty of time alone in his car, driving through every kind of awful hell, to think about it.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because we’re still alive.  Because we still try.  Because we’re here talking about it instead of down there drinking ourselves into oblivion.  How the fuck should I know?”

 

He doesn’t mean to sound pissed off, but he is.  He never asked to be a hero, never asked to be John’s son or Sam’s brother, and though there’s a lot he wouldn’t give up—Sam laughing wild, head back on the seat beside him; Dad jacking a round into the shotgun and handing it to Dean for the first time, steadying his hands on the stock and warning him about recoil; Bobby calling him an idiot and then handing him some wormy, rotting book—maybe he’d walk away from the hero part if he could.

 

Maybe Jax hears something of all that in Dean’s angry outburst because when he finally replies, it’s quiet, without heat, but warm like he wants to offer Dean some comfort, except he isn’t sure how it’ll be received.

 

“I think we’re heroes because we haven’t given up and said fuck it yet.  And because our fathers wanted us to be and we can’t seem to say no even to their fucking ghosts.”

 

Dean doesn’t answer, isn’t sure he can.  What would he say:  _I failed mine already?_  

 

He deflects instead.

 

“So you were about to tell me how much harder our lives are going to suck according to the prophecy…”

 

Jax lights another cigarette, this one different.  The sweet smoke drifts across Dean’s face in a mellow veil.

 

The biker offers him the joint.  Dean shakes his head.  “No, thanks.  Never developed the habit.”  But he’s not judging, and he tries to make that clear from his tone.

 

Voice tight on the inhale, Jax answers, “’salright.”

 

Before Dean’s impatience makes itself known, Jax continues.  “One of the Sons of John is going to die.  The other brings about the end of the end, or some shit.”

 

“You got this written down somewhere?”  Dean’s skepticism is evident. Sometimes his professionalism shows.

 

Jax waves like Dean can see through the floor.  “We keep a notebook of Tig’s prophecies in church.”

  
 _Naturally_ , Dean thinks.  _Where else would you keep the newest testament?_

 

Filing that fact away, Dean changes the subject again.  “So, Tig…”  He leaves it hanging, gives Jax a chance to push him off it if he wants to.

 

Apparently, he doesn’t want to.  “It was wild, man.  We were doing a run to Damascus, Oregon, to patch over the Devil’s Own, when out of nowhere—I mean, clear blue sky, sun shining—lightning strikes Tig’s bike.  He lays it down, gets pinned under it, dragged for a hundred and fifty yards.  We thought he was dead for sure; no way anyone’s walkin’ away from that.  But when I get to him, he’s awake.  His eyes are open, and they’re white like you see ‘em now, and he’s mumbling.  At first I think it’s nonsense.  I mean, half of his face is ground hamburger, there’s blood everywhere.  And then Bobby comes puffing up and says, ‘Is that Hebrew?’  Turns out it was Greek.  After that, we couldn’t shut Tig up, not even in the hospital.  Kept pulling off the oxygen mask to tell us about the sun dividing in half and a third of the earth going barren.  Like he’d downloaded Vacation Bible School or something when the lightning knocked him on his ass.”

 

Jax laughs a little, fondness and sadness in there, both.  “Guy wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders before he became a prophet of the apocalypse.  Now, he’s just…”  He leaves it go, but Dean can fill in the rest.

 

He lets the silence sit for a minute, broken only by the high-pitched laughs that pierce the floor under their feet.

 

Then he says, carefully, “And your mom?”

 

Jax shifts like he’s going to get up, and Dean figures the conversation’s over, but the other man just settles a little in place, one sneaker prodding the binder like it might cough up a few more secrets if he does it hard enough.

 

“Clay—“  It’s a misfire, and Jax clears his throat.  “Mom was always the strong one.  This club might’ve been built by men, but it was put on her shoulders from day one, and she carried us all.  Clay’s death just…it did something to her.  Broke her, I guess.  I don’t know.  She cried for days, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, nothin’.  The only one she’d quiet down for was Tig.  They’d start whispering in Greek or some shit, and then she’d be okay for awhile.”

 

Jax takes a last drag on the joint and pinches it out.

  
Through a long, slow streamer of smoke, he finishes, “She stopped crying eventually, but her eyes…she wasn’t right.  She couldn’t really take care of herself.  Tig called her ‘The Mother of Sorrows.’  It fit.”

 

“So last night, when she touched me…”

 

Jax turns toward Dean, and Dean can see his profile, see his expression, soft for his mother, speculative for Dean.  “You did something to her.  Brought her back to herself.  To us.”

 

Jax looks up at the almost empty sky, says so softly Dean wouldn’t hear it if he wasn’t watching the other man’s lips, limned in silver light from the sliver of moon just creeping its way into the center of the sky: 

 

“To me.”

 

Dean has to clench his fists to keep from grabbing Jax, yanking him down to kneel between his open legs and drive that lost look off the other man’s face. 

 

This isn’t the time or the place.

 

Instead, Dean stands, slaps Jax on the shoulder, says, “I’m turning in.  Six, right?”

 

Jax nods.

 

Dean’s halfway down the ladder when he hears, “’night,” following after him. 

 

“Goodnight,” he answers, wondering if it’ll carry to the man sitting alone on the rooftop, watching over the world.

 

Shivering at a sudden chill, Dean hurries inside and is happy to find J.C. passed out on Juice’s lap.  He doesn’t really want the company tonight.  Or rather, she’s not the company he’d like to be keeping.

 

He threads his way through the bodies sprawled in various postures of pleasure around the big room, uses the head in the back, stops to stare at the aqua-and-white bike displayed in honor along the rear wall of the club. 

 

Some instinct stays his hand before he can touch it, before he can feel the caged life of the engine beneath his tingling fingers.

 

Shaking off superstition, Dean heads for his room and toes off his boots, drops jeans and shirts and falls heavily into bed.

 

If he dreams, he doesn’t remember it.  Sometimes it’s the little gifts that are best.

 

The air is fresh and free of blood-dust, always a bonus for road trips.  Dean’s riding shotgun in an old, olive-drab Jeep 4x4, the engine noise and whistling wind through the open windows making it hard to hear.

 

The sun is shining, the air is warm, and Dean almost forgets for a minute that it’s the apocalypse.

 

Until the barricade of rotten bodies in the road reminds him.

 

“Scavenger roadblock,” Jax shouts over the idling engine.  They’re upwind of the dead, thankfully, looking for ways around the barrier, each of them surveying the surrounding scrub with an eye for ambush.

 

Jax points to a place back up the road a ways where a culvert allows passage to the field on the other side of the drainage ditch.  It’s going to be rough riding—and this Jeep has seen better days.  He stares at the path with apprehension.  Still, there’s no other way around the bodies.

 

Dean readies the scattergun and looks for signs of scavengers in the low hills to their right as Jax bulls the Jeep over the culvert and into the rutted earth of the field.  Dean curses and slams a hand to the roof to steady himself, trying to keep the gun in his other hand and his eyes on the hills.

 

It’s the perfect place for scavengers to jump them.

 

But nothing jumps out at them, no glint of light off glass or metal, no rustling unaccounted for except by wind, and soon enough they’re around the bodies, downwind now and trying not to gag, and then they’re across the ditch on a rutted driveway and back on the road.

 

It’s strange, in his experience, that nothing bad has happened yet.

 

The unnatural calm is sustained until just south of Lodi, when they arrive at a barricade they’re going to have more trouble getting around.

 

There’s a gaping hole where the road used to be.  Sulfurous smoke billows in toxic clouds, and they have to back off a hundred yards and roll the windows up to breathe at all.

 

The rift extends to either side of the road by at least sixty feet.  Beyond it, the earth looks wrinkled, like a single breath would fold it into deeper cracks.

 

“Fuck,” Jax says, but conversationally, like this is the sort of thing that happens all the time.

 

Since it’s the apocalypse, Dean takes it in stride, too.

  
“There another way in?”

 

Jax points back the way they came.  “It’ll take us way out of our way, though.  And I don’t know those roads as well.  We tend to stick to wide open highways where we can.”

 

It’s good policy, whether they’re on bikes or in the old clunker. 

 

Dean doesn’t think the rift is an accident, either, and he has a feeling something’s waiting for them in Lodi that they probably don’t want to face.

 

Still, what choice do they have? 

 

He half expects to see a dragon rising out of the yellow smoke behind them as Jax turns them around, and he breathes a little easier when they can open the windows again without worrying about asphyxia.

 

Three miles back, they come to a side road, two lanes, pitted with disuse.  It’s dicey, taking unknown routes, no telling what they’re going to find. 

 

They get a mile, maybe a little more, when the first barrier blocks their way in the form of a jack-knifed semi, and jammed beneath the skewed trailer, what might have been a convertible Cadillac.

 

Jax whistles, Dean sighs, and they bounce and bump over a shallow ditch and onto the front lawn of a yellow house, green shutters banging noisily in the rising wind.

 

“Something’s coming,” Dean says, scenting trouble in the stewing air.

 

Jax’s jaw is tight when he nods his agreement, and he speeds up as soon as they’re back on the road.

 

A second and then a third roadblock—both multi-car pile-ups—slows them again, and it’s starting to grow prematurely dark when they reach the next turn-off north to Lodi.

 

Jax takes it on two wheels, Dean scrabbling for purchase, glad for the seatbelt keeping him from spilling into Jax when he over-corrects and then straightens them out.

  
“Easy,” Dean says.  “Don’t want to become another roadblock.”

 

Jax lets up a little on the accelerator.  “I don’t like what I’m seein’ back there.”

Dean looks out through the dusty rear window of the Jeep, sees anvilheads piling up in the sky, blood-red at the edges, unnatural fire glowing within like an infernal blacksmith is working overtime.  Thunder hammers in the distance.

 

“We’ve gotta make it to sanctuary before that storm hits.”

 

Dean’s seen a lot of things in his years on the road, but this storm is different somehow, darker and uglier, with a kind of malevolent weight that bears down on them. 

 

Like the weather is demon-driven and aimed at stopping them.

 

“Go faster,” he urges Jax, counter to what he’d just said, and Jax obeys, putting the pedal to the floor, the big V8 engine straining against the rising wind.

 

They pass a billboard, half unhinged, swinging wildly in the storm wind, and Dean catches sight of the words, “Lodi Motel, 2 miles ahead.”

 

The Jeep is rocking now, Jax swearing and straining hard against the wheel to keep her on the road, debris pinging off the doors.

 

Something shatters the rear window and Dean ducks and curses, throwing an arm up to deflect the worst of the glass, grateful he insisted on wearing his leather jacket despite the cries of “Pussy” it earned him when he did.  He might be sweating, but at least he’s not shredded.

 

A street appears to their right and an eighth of a mile later to their left, but the signs are gone, so he has no idea where they are.  In the downtime the day before, Dean’d sat down with a map of Lodi Juice had scared up, Tig at the table with him and had had the prophet trace his fingers over the whole thing.

 

His middle finger had come back three times to St. John the Baptist Episcopal on Lower Sacramento Road.

 

Dean’s squinting through the dust-devils and wicked darkness to read street signs, some of which have been plowed down or blown away, a few of which are coated in sticky black tar that Dean refuses to identify.

 

Eventually, though, he sees one that looks promising.  “Left!”

 

Jax swears a steady stream and muscles the Jeep into a turn. 

 

The storm is almost on them now, and Dean can’t see three feet ahead of them.  “Slow down!” he shouts, straining to be heard above the screaming wind.

 

There are voices in it, but he ignores them, refuses to look into the grey clouds that seem to form from nothing and hover, in defiance of all natural forces, around the passenger side window.

 

“There!  Right, make a right!”

 

He’s guiding them by instinct now, the map useless in the impenetrable darkness, the Jeeps’ headlights doing nothing to dispel the gloom.

 

They creep along, the wind like strong hands rocking them, and he’s pretty sure they’re done-for when he sees the strangely quaint lines of the church rising out of the darkness to their right.

 

The voices join in a choir of agonizing shrieks as Jax guns the Jeep right up to the front doors of the church.  Grabbing his duffle, Dean shoves at the door, shouting and screaming invective at the wind as it pushes back, refusing to let him out. 

 

He feels Jax slide up behind him, and then the other man’s arms are beside his own, pushing against the door just where it meets the window.  There’s a little give, enough for Dean to wedge the duffle into the gap.

 

Another shove, and they’ve made enough space for Dean to slide out sideways, Jax following, their bodies pressed close, breath almost lost to them as the wind rips it from their mouths.  They’re both grinning like idiots when they finally wrestle the church door open and stagger inside, falling to their hands and knees with the cessation of pressure against their bodies.

 

Dean flips onto his back and stares up at the ceiling of the foyer.  Jax does the same.  The storm rages outside, but inside it’s relatively quiet, except for their panting breaths.  Around them, paper is scattered like snowflakes.

 

Dean turns his head enough to read the title of one of the pamphlets:  “What is God’s purpose for you?”

 

He starts to laugh, and his laugh reverberates into the vaster space of the church itself, somewhere behind him.

 

He can feel Jax looking at him, and without thinking, he turns his head toward him.  They are feet apart, no chance of contact, but it feels like they’re touching the length of their bodies together.  Dean breathes out a, “Holy—“

 

And Jax finishes it, “—Shit.”

 

Overhead, the storm winds shake the church bell into pealing.

 

Both of them are on their feet in seconds after that, though Dean’s knee protests and he has to take a moment to balance himself.

 

He shakes off the feeling of his skin vibrating and walks into the church.  Like others he’s been in, this one seems mostly untouched by the chaos of the outside world, and not for the first time, Dean considers that it’s almost obscene, the calmness of sanctuary.

 

The place smells of disuse, of the dusty red rug down the center aisle, of pillar candles left half-burned, of whatever the ladies auxiliary used to clean the wooden pews.

 

They do the usual perimeter check, Jax taking one side, Dean the other, neither saying a word, just falling into the pattern like it’s old habit for them both.  When they reach the hallway leading to the church hall from the vestry, Dean holds up a hand, brushing Jax’s chest.

 

The energy that zings through him makes him yank his hand away, and by Jax’s sudden inhale, he guesses it was a mutual feeling.

 

“What?” Jax says, a little impatient.

  
“Sanctuary ends here.  They must not’ve consecrated the hall.”

 

“How can you tell?”

  
Dean just shrugs, turning around.  Jax has no choice but to do the same, leading them back through the vestry and out onto the altar.

 

“You pick up on it after awhile.”

  
It’s the truth—enough of it for Jax, anyway—and the other man seems to accept it.

 

Then Dean’s eyes fall on the covered baptismal font to one side of the altar and says, “Yes,” with a low hiss of victory, moving quickly, one hand already digging around in the duffle he brings everywhere with him. 

 

Opening the cover on the font, an impromptu prayer silent on his lips, Dean almost can’t bring himself to look.

 

Water.

  
Holy water.  Lots of it—at least a couple of gallons.  The lid had kept it from evaporating, and the ladies must have done a solid job of keeping the font clean, too, because there’s no algae, no scum mucking up the purity of the water.

 

“Score,” he says, and Jax moves forward to look into the font, as though there could be something else there besides water.

 

“Holy water?”

 

“Dude, this shit is great on demons.  I mean, I can make it myself, but the shit from churches is way better.”

 

“You allowed to say ‘shit’ in a church?”  
  


That catches Dean’s attention, and he gives Jax a quizzical look.  “You never been in a church before?”  Granted, Dean was himself not the most faithful of followers, a dyed-in-the-leather agnostic at best, but he has some experience with churches.

 

Jax shrugs a shoulder like he can deflect the question that way.  “Yeah, sure.  But we’re not big on organized religion.”

 

Dean lets it go.  “Besides, the guys upstairs aren’t really patrolling anymore, in case you haven’t noticed.”

 

“Guys?”

 

“Angels.  You know, God’s right hands.  They’ve given up on earth, are up there—“  Dean waves a hand in an indistinct upward motion, “—having a circle jerk to the Greatest Harp Hits of the World or something.”

 

Jax snorts.  “And you know this how?”

 

Dean considers not answering, spends a minute watching water flow into the plastic bottle he’s filling, and then wonders how to explain it.  There’s no way to say, “I had an angel of the lord watching over me,” without sounding like a pansy or an asshole or both.

 

Finally, though, he figures he should just get it over with.  It’s not like Jax hasn’t dealt with divine whimsy some on his own.

  
“I had an angel for awhile.”

 

“An angel?  Like wings and white robes and shit?”

 

Summoning a picture of Castiel in his head, Dean makes a derisive noise.  “No.  More like Men’s Warehouse and five o’clock shadow.” 

 

Jax looks confused.  Dean almost feels sorry for him.

 

“It’s complicated.”

 

“We’ve got time,” Jax notes dryly as the wind outside kicks up several decibels, rattling the simple stained glass in its casements.

 

Dean finishes filling one bottle, caps it, starts on another.

 

“Castiel was sent to help me prevent the apocalypse.”

 

“He did a great job.”  Arid like the desert Dean had driven through only a few days before.  He gives Jax a look, and the biker holds up a hand as if to say, _Okay, fine, talk._

 

“That was complicated, too.  Anyway, once the seals were all broken and Lucifer rose, Castiel had to return to the ranks of the heavenly host.  All the angels left the earth then, which is when shit started to get really deep for the people who lived here.”

 

“And you were there for all of that.”

  

The second bottle is full, and Dean’s working on a third, figuring he can fill it halfway, at least, when Jax breaks their silence.

 

“So what were they like?”

 

Dean has to admire the way the guy takes things in, ponders and processes without a lot of bullshit.

 

“Angels?”

 

Jax nods.  Dean caps the third bottle and buys time stowing all three in his duffle.

 

“Douchebags, mostly.  Cas was alright, though.  He didn’t really get the whole being human thing, but he wasn’t bad to have at our backs in a fight.”

 

“Our?”

 

Dean curses internally and considers his next words.  He settles at last on some compromise between what actually happened and what he can endure telling.

 

“My brother and me.”

 

“So Sam was a hunter, too?”

 

Dean clenches his jaw, moves his hands restlessly on the handle of the duffle.  They’re just standing now in front of the altar, facing out to the empty pews like they’re preaching to a congregation of ghosts.

 

He takes the two shallow steps down and crosses to a pew, stretching out, head on the duffle.

 

Jax sits on the floor at the opposite end from where Dean has settled.  His back up against the wider wood of the pew’s leg, his own stretched out in front of him, Jax fishes a partial spliff out of his cut and lights it up.

 

Dean laughs.  “You were worried about me _swearing_ in church.”

 

“It’s holy smoke,” Jax answers, sly grin on his face.

 

“Riiiight.”  Dean stretches it out like a stoner, and that earns him another huff of laughter.

 

There’s companionable quiet, minus the demonic storm outside, for a stretch of long breaths, until Jax has smoked the joint down to his fingertips.

 

Then he says, “My brother got his first bike when he was two.  It was a little motorized Harley that Bobby put together.  Tommy loved it, rode that damned thing everywhere—even in the house.  I thought Mom was going to have a stroke, the way she’d yell at my father to get the kid out of the kitchen.”  Jax’s laugh then is warm, fond and affectionate, his voice younger somehow for the years he’s travelled back through to get to the memory.

 

Dean isn’t fooled.  He knows what this is about, but he figures tit for tat isn’t so bad, not when there’s nothing to do but wait.

 

“Sam didn’t find out about hunting until he was eight, but he lived the life even before that, the training anyway.  Dad didn’t really let him do jobs until he was thirteen.  And he went away to college for awhile.  Then…well, shit happens.  And he got back in the life.  And it killed him.” 

 

Dean wants it to be that easy.  Wants his tone to say, _I’m done talking about this_.  But after a few more minutes of wind-driven silence, Jax swivels his head against the pew seat and levels Dean with a look he can feel even if he isn’t looking back at Jax.

 

“Tommy fell out of a tree when he was four.  Said he was climbing it so he could be taller than me.  He was never a real strong kid, so climbing that tree was something.  Dad picked him up, put him on his shoulders, and walked him around the yard.  Tommy put his arms out like he was flying, and I made airplane sounds.  He loved that.  He was the happiest damned kid.  Laughed at the stupidest shit.”

 

Dean turns his head and looks down the pew at Jax, who’s got his eyes fixed on the church organ straight ahead of him, though Dean knows he’s seeing something a lot further out of reach than the dusty keyboard.  The man has a strange half-smile on his face, maybe the joy carved out by sorrow making inroads on it.

 

Anyway, it’s a look Dean imagines he’s worn himself often enough.

 

“Sam was a real chubby little kid, and we were always the new kids in town, livin’ in motels, never fitting in.  Half the time Dad couldn’t keep us in good clothes.  School was hell for him, but he went anyway.  He loved books and reading and knowing shit.  Even at ten, eleven, he could pull facts out of his ass.  I called him dork and geek, but I think he kind of liked it.  Dad had him learn Greek one summer we spent at Bobby’s.  Kid picked it up.  Man, he was smart.  He was so fucking smart.”

 

Dean has to stop.  Thinking about Sam’s intelligence, about how fast he was to figure things, how far he got into researching even obscure shit, it’s too hard, too close.  He can remember the linoleum-topped table in a room outside of Reno, Sam’s laptop overheating in the rolling brown-outs not long before the end of things.  Can remember Sam desperately trying to patch together enough information from the internet, which was slow as hell and down more places than not.

 

Can remember the way his brother smiled, exhausted and hollow-eyed, but smiling, at finding out where the next demonic attack was likely to come.  How proud he was.  How hopeful.

 

Dean closes his eyes tight against that image of his brother, tries to block it out, to unsee it.  He can’t do this…

 

He starts to sit up and bring his legs around but Jax stops him, hand stretched out over the pew to wrap around his ankle.

 

It’s a strangely intimate gesture for two men who don’t know each other that well.  They’ve been eye-fucking since they met, but this is different.  There’s comfort in the touch and something else, reflected in Jax’s eyes, too, which are hooded and not really looking at Dean’s face:  Knowing.  Sorrow.  Regret.

 

Dean pulls away and sits up, leaning his forearms along the tops of his legs and letting his head drop.  Jax brings his knees up to drape his wrists over them.  They sit like that for a long time, tension growing, not looking at each other, not speaking.

  
The wind outside rises to a screaming pitch, hurtling itself against the windows.  They hear a crack, as if something hard has struck a window, and then a second and a third.  Soon enough, it’s a constant barrage, and they look at each other then, deciding what to do about it.

 

“Hail,” Jax suggests at last.

 

“Yeah.” Dean’s voice is rough, like they’re talking about something else.

 

“We had toads once.  I mean, outside of Charming.  Weirdest fucking thing.  Some of ‘em didn’t die right away, either, just sort of flopped around half broken.  There were so many of ‘em on the ground, you couldn’t drive around ‘em.  We scraped legs out of our wheels for days.”

 

“I was in Port Royal for the snake thing.”

 

And like that, they find their way back to safer ground, swapping increasingly unlikely stories that are, nonetheless, mostly true.  The hail thunders down, the wind shrieks and keens in the eaves, and they raise their voices over it, until they’re practically shouting.

 

Jax is just finishing a story about a two-headed calf in Moderna when the noise stops so abruptly that they’re left with a ringing in their ears and his overly loud final word—incongruously, “heart”—echoing around the nave.

 

“Think it’s over?” he whispers after the silence has extended for several minutes.  True night has fallen while they’ve talked, the unnatural darkness of the storm being replaced by the no more natural abyss of the moonless night.  At some point, one of them had lit the pillar candles to either side of the altar and the slender white ones on the altar itself.  It lends a sort of gentleness to the otherwise smothering dark.

 

Like the darkness has heard Jax and come to answer him, something strikes the church doors with a resounding boom.  The frame rattles.  The chain looped over the handle loosens and slithers to the floor in a musical chiming all out of keeping with the violence of the attack.

 

Another strike and another, all around them now, as though giant hammers are trying to bring down the walls on them.

 

They’re both on their feet, back to back, hands up.  Dean’s got his gun, Jax his knife.

 

“It’s a trick to drive us out into the open.  Stand your ground,” Dean says, voice low and tight with tension.  “This is holy ground.  Even if the building comes down around us, they still can’t touch us.”

 

“Who?” Jax hisses, eyes wild, darting from place to place, waiting for the next strike.

 

“My guess?  Arch-demons.”

 

“What?”

 

“Like archangels, only…evil.”

 

“From what you told me about angels, ‘evil’ is relative.”

 

A terrific crash drowns out Dean’s initial rejoinder.  Plaster sifts down from the roof and the wagon-wheel light fixtures overhead shimmy and sway on their chains.  In unison, they move toward the altar, as though instinctively seeking the holiest place in the church for shelter.  In fact, given the way the enormous cross on the wall behind them is shaking on its mountings, maybe they shouldn’t stay there, either.

 

Then, as quickly as it began, the assault on their senses stops.  Slowly, the lights cease their swinging, the cross steadies and stills, and silence falls on their heads so that Jax actually opens his jaw as if trying to ease the pressure in his ears.

 

Dean waits, the tension drawing the muscles of his shoulders painfully tight.  A glance at Jax shows the man is likewise holding his breath.

 

Nothing happens.

 

When nothing continues happening for ten minutes, Dean lets out a breath and slumps down where he was standing, stretching out on the blue carpet that extends from the nave under the altar and out to the top of the marble steps.

 

Jax follows suit. 

 

They’re closer here than they had been in the foyer, and Dean can practically feel the buzzing of the other man’s blood in his veins.  It’s uncomfortable, this sensation, and Dean finds himself sliding his hand closer to see if touching Jax will relieve the feeling of having ants under his skin.

 

The little finger of his left hand just brushes the side of Jax’s right.

 

The buzzing ceases and then swells into something else, something needy and enormous.

 

He pulls his hand away even as he hears Jax breathe out, “Jesus.”

 

“We gotta get out of this church.”  He sits up, as if to go somewhere else, but Jax’s hand flat on his lower back stops him.

 

“There’s nowhere to go, man.  This is it.”

 

“This isn’t us,” Dean insists, feeling the heat of Jax’s hand through his leather, spreading out along his lower back and through to his belly, stirring a hunger he’d almost forgotten about in the last two years.

 

“Does it matter?”

 

Dean looks at Jax, who’s levered himself up on one elbow so that he can reach Dean’s back.  “It should.”

 

“You sayin’ you didn’t want this before we got to the Church of Unholy Fucking?”

 

Dean laughs, feels it reverberate through his belly, come back to him through Jax’s hand, which hasn’t moved, as if Jax is waiting for permission to do more.

 

“Fuck no.  I wanted it.  I just don’t like being pushed by some fucking supernatural force.”

 

“Does that mean you want me to move my hand?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Jax removes his hand, and Dean feels bereft, so he adds, “I didn’t say where I wanted you to move it to, bitch.”

 

The hand is there again, this time gripping the base of his neck, and he can feel that Jax is sitting up now, can feel the heat of the man’s body only inches from his back, can hear the way Jax’s breathing has changed, grown faster, the way his hand trembles minutely against the fine hairs at the back of Dean’s skull.

 

Jax squeezes, and it brings a moan out of Dean, who wants nothing more than to let go of every fucking thing and just have this.

  
He doesn’t trust it, though, not the tingling rightness of it, not the way Jax makes him feel safe enough to say things—things about Sam, about his dad, about the end of it all—that he never shares with anyone.

  
It’s wrong.  It’s been two days.  This man’s a stranger.

 

Jax releases Dean’s nape to stroke the palm of his hand down the back of Dean’s head and then knead with his fingertips the knob at the top of Dean’s spine.

 

He groans, dropping his head at the sensation, and like that, all will is drained from him. 

 

Jax takes his hand away, and Dean looks up to see the other man rising, shedding his cut, kicking out of his sneakers.

 

Dean stands, then, too, and follows suit, shedding layers, fingers slow on the zipper of his jeans, hesitating when it’s just the waistband of his boxers beneath his callused fingertips.

 

There’s no hesitation that Dean can see in Jax, the man stripping decisively, every now and then offering Dean an inscrutable look that might be approval or could be terror.  Dean doesn’t know him well enough to be sure.

  
Dean doesn’t know him well enough.

 

But there’s a wave welling up inside of him, curling up from his core, that reaches his throat in a constricted noise of need and want and hope. 

 

That last scares him more than anything he’s seen or heard or felt since the world came apart and he lost his brother.

 

“I can’t—“ he says, pussying out, and he hates himself a little, but there’s relief, too, if he’s honest, and it would be embarrassing, humiliating, except Jax ignores it, steps right into Dean’s space and wraps his hands around Dean’s, nudging them lower, until Dean starts to remove his boxers and Jax steps back just far enough to let Dean get out of them.

 

Jax is right back in his space, breath brushing Dean’s cheek, hand wrapping firmly around Dean’s half-interested member, which seems to be on the verge of deciding without him whether or not this is something he wants.

 

The heat of the touch arrows through him, shocking, and Dean jerks his head back, might have fallen for lack of equilibrium if Jax hadn’t grabbed his shoulder with his free hand.  He feels like the earth is moving under their feet.

 

“I got ya,” Jax promises, and Dean shudders out a breath and lets his head fall to Jax’s shoulder.

 

That touch, the life of the man beating just below his closed eyes, draws another sound from Dean, and he can’t stop himself from sinking his teeth into the tender flesh joining neck and collarbone.

 

Jax growls out a harsh, “Fuck, yeah,” and speeds his grip, and Dean spreads one hand wide at the base of Jax’s back and with the other returns the favor of furious stroking.

 

They’re panting out harsh explosions of breath, his wet where it washes over Jax’s neck, the spot where he’d bitten Jax reddened by the rough flat of his tongue riding over it again and then again.

 

Jax is cursing now, low and steady, hips rocking into Dean’s touch, cock driving through the ring of Dean’s callused fingers.  Jax’s hands are rough, too, the one not busy on his aching cock now moving down the line of his back, dipping into the small of it, sliding down with plundering ease into the crack of his ass.

 

Dean groans, a loud sound, echoing in the abandoned church, and throws his head back, which leaves his throat open for pillage.  He loses any coordination after that, loses track of what his own hands are doing.

 

Jax’s mouth is busy on Dean’s neck, his teeth fastening around the delicate apple, squeezing just enough to remind him who started this all, and Dean comes, hard enough that he loses breath on the shout, so hard that he loses balance, too, feeling his knees buckle only as a distant example of gravity happening to someone else.

  
Jax abandons his stroking to lower Dean to the rough carpet behind the altar.  His heart is hammering in his chest, blood thundering in his ears, and when he finally manages to open his eyes, Jax’s head is surrounded in a halo of candlelight, and Dean can just make out a self-satisfied smirk on the other man’s sweaty face.

 

“Shut up,” he whispers, voice fucked rough, and Jax laughs, a filthy, joyous sound.

 

Dean recovers enough to feel the hard length of the other man against the hair of his sticky thigh, and he reaches down to wrap his fingers loosely around it. 

 

Jax’s breath hitches, and it’s Dean’s turn to smile.

 

“You want to come inside?”

 

He feels the change in the man, then, the way he stills, only his cock twitching restlessly against Dean’s palm.

 

“Fuck, yeah,” Jax says at last, and when he moves out of the nimbus of candlelight, Dean can see his expression, something akin to reverence there.

 

“It’s not holy,” Dean insists, but he knows it’s a lie.

 

Jax doesn’t answer with words, just shifts to his knees between Dean’s spread thighs and lowers his weight until they’re touching from pelvis to toes.

 

Jax dips his hips and slides his cock along the crease of Dean’s pelvis, and Dean widens his legs more, brings his knees up to make a tighter fit.

 

“Jesus,” Jax groans, head going back.

 

Dean leans up enough to suck a love mark at the base of Jax’s throat, and Jax groans, hips juddering out of rhythm.

 

“St-stop,” he stutters.  “Or I’ll come right now.”

 

Dean laughs and licks a line to Jax’s nipple, fastens his teeth there, roughs his tongue over the bud.

 

Jax whines, fucking _whines_ , and Dean grips the man’s ass, digs his fingers into the bunched muscles, croaks, “Fucking come for me,” against the swell of Jax’s chest.

 

With a grunt, Jax thrusts harder once, twice, and Dean feels the heated evidence of his pleasure against his ribs.

 

Then the man’s full weight is on him, and for just that moment, he feels safe for the first time in forever.  Then he’s pushing, grumbling, “You’re fucking heavy, man.  Switch to light beer,” and trying not to expose his panic. 

 

Jax flops bonelessly beside him, breathy laugh leaving him.  Just the edges of their hands are touching, but it’s like a closed circuit, grounding him, and Dean can feel something flowing through them both.

 

He wants to move his hand, but he doesn’t.

 

When their breathing evens out and the sweat dries to shivering on their naked skin, Jax says, “That was…”

 

And Dean finishes, “…yeah.”

 

There’s nervous laughter from both of them, then, and Dean wonders if it’s possible to die of awkward.

 

And then Jax rolls to his side, propped on one elbow, to look at Dean, and suddenly awkward is something else, something heavy and immediate, not belonging, precisely, but damned close, like he’s being catalogued for salvation.

 

He watches Jax looking at him, at the intent way Jax takes in details, and it makes him feel…

 

Dean shakes it off.  Fuck this.  “See something you like?”

 

Jax doesn’t respond in the expected way, though, doesn’t play the deflection game.  A frown creases the skin between his eyes and he raises a hand to ghost a touch down the long scar on Dean’s left leg, the one that ends in a deep comma at the knee joint.

 

He does the same with other scars—the three silver lines low on Dean’s belly, where he was raked by a pitchfork-wielding Amish guy who’d been possessed by something yellow-eyed and ugly.  The ridged, ragged-edged rough circle where he’d been punctured in the gut by a hot poker.  The anti-possession tattoo, skin teased and jumping under Jax’s light touch.  The hard lump on his breastbone that Dean moves Jax’s hand away from without a word.

 

The still distinct handprint that burns beneath Jax’s palm when he presses his own hand to it.

  
“What did that?”

 

Dean has to clear his throat to say, “Angel.”

 

Jax’s look is hard to read, but it’s clear he wants more.

 

“I went to hell.  Cas got me out.”

 

Eight words.  Eight thousand images behind Dean’s eyes.

 

“Hell, huh?”

 

Dean makes a motion with his chin that might be a nod.  He’s frozen, pinned by Jax’s burning hand, which still has not moved from the angelic mark.

 

“They got Harleys?”

 

“Yeah, and sweetbutts with devil’s horns and forked tails.”

 

Jax strokes the mark, eyes thoughtful, and then trails the tips of his fingers down to Dean’s wrist, which still shows the vague shape of shackles bruised permanently into the delicate skin.  That was another kind of hell, where he got those marks.  He lets it go, doesn’t have the strength to break the quiet of Jax’s exploration.

 

The blue vein in Dean’s wrist pulses against Jax’s finger as he traces the swell of it.

 

“You got any stories that don’t end in blood and suffering?”

 

Dean has to resist the urge to say, “One,” and to reach out and trace the line of Jax’s jaw.  There’s no other way this story can end, either, and he’s a fool to let himself believe anything else.

 

Jax must sense the shift in Dean’s mood because he moves his hand away at last, leaving Dean feeling cold all over.  He stands, says, “Gotta take a leak,” and disappears back toward the vestry and the tiny closet of a bathroom they’d found there earlier.

 

He comes back a few minutes later carrying white vestments and an altar cloth.

 

“Planning a service?” Dean asks from where he’s propped himself up on both elbows to watch Jax.

 

Jax throws a bundle of cloth at him, and Dean sits up to shake it out.  “Give me my gun?”

 

Soon enough, they’re settled on the rug, heads pillowed on rolled-up vestments, covered together by an altar cloth.

 

Dean can feel the heat of the other man close to his arm, knows there are only inches separating them, but it might as well be miles.  He hasn’t done this in a million years, can’t even name the last time he shared a bed—or what passes for a bed—with another man.  Can’t swallow around the way his heart keeps leaping up his throat. 

 

And then Jax says, “Fuck it,” and rolls toward him, fitting his knee between Dean’s thighs, resting his head on the swell of Dean’s shoulder.  Dean has little choice but to make room for the other man.

 

Jax slides his hand down Dean’s chest, spreads his palm over his belly.

 

“You drool on me, there’ll be hell to pay in the morning,” Dean warns.  
  
He feels Jax’s snort against his breast.  “Shut up, bitch.”

 

“ _I’m_ the bitch?  Who’s cuddling me like a fuckin’ girl here?”

 

Jax raises his head and looks at Dean, and Dean’s suddenly dry-throated and wordless.

 

He shuts up.

 

He doesn’t know what wakes him, doesn’t remember falling asleep.  Jax is snoring quietly, gusts of breath across Dean’s neck, where the man has burrowed in.  His arm is asleep beneath Jax’s neck, but he doesn’t try to shift him off.  He lies there, trying to discern what brought him out of sleep.

 

It’s dark.  The altar candles have burned out, but the pillars to either side are still glowing, though the flame is deep in their cylinders of wax, now, providing only a glow to the air above them.  He can’t see around the leg of the altar and into the church itself, and that makes him nervous.

 

He clutches his gun in his other hand and waits.

 

There.

 

Scratching, faint and faraway but definite, something with volition making noises in the night.

 

Dean wonders if it’s one of the infected trying to get in at the vestry door, but when he hears it again, it comes from out in the church itself, not from behind them, where a narrow door leads back to the church hall and the unconsecrated spaces beyond.

 

A pain in his bad knee makes him shift his weight, and Jax snuffles and shifts, too, but doesn’t awaken.

 

Dean listens to the arrhythmic sound, its indefinite dimensions worrying at his memory.  He’s heard it before, he’s sure.

 

A sudden fluttering has him bolting upright, pins and needles shooting through his left arm, Jax rolling away, tangled in the altar cloth, cursing.

 

“Quiet,” Dean whispers, and Jax does as he’s told.

 

More fluttering, as of a flurry of wings.

 

Or just one pair, huge and impossible, unfurling.

 

“Holy—“ Jax starts.

  
“Shit,” Dean ends, disgusted, climbing to his feet, completely disregarding his nakedness.  “You show up _now_?  After all this fucking time you have the balls to show up now?”

 

Jax is staring back and forth between Dean and the angel who’s appeared, wings and all, in the center aisle of the church, and Dean would find his expression funny if he weren’t so pissed off at Castiel.

 

“What do you want, you son of a bitch?”

 

“I came to deliver a message.”

 

Dean makes a derisive noise.  “Still God’s bitch, huh?  Guess that whole Heavenly Host gig isn’t working out for you.”

 

“I haven’t much time.  You need to return to Charming.  _Now_.”

 

“Says who?”  And yeah, it’s childish, but Dean doesn’t care.  The angels left them long ago, abandoned him and his brother to their apparent fates, left the world to burn.

 

“You know for whom it is I speak, Dean.”

 

“Yeah, and why should I listen to him?”

 

“He’s chosen you, Dean.  You must know that.”  And Castiel gestures at Jax, still on the floor beside him, naked, the altar cloth draped low on his hips.  Dean is distracted, despite the angel in the room, by the way Jax’s back muscles flex as he holds himself upright, by the way his eyes are taking in every detail of Castiel’s appearance.  By the taut vee of his abdomen where it arrows toward his pelvis.

 

He licks his lips and catches in Castiel’s eyes an emotion he never expected to see.  Envy, perhaps, or desire, something Cas had been incapable of.

 

Something is wrong.

  
“Who are you?”  Dean’s voice commands an answer.

 

Castiel’s eyes come back to Dean’s, startled for a second before his features smooth out into a neutral superiority. 

 

“We don’t have time for games, Dean.”

 

“You’re not Castiel.”

 

And the angel bows his head.  “It’s enough that you know I speak for Him who commands all living things.”

 

“What happened to Castiel?”  He doesn’t care, he tells himself.  The angel had forsaken him when he and Sam needed him the most.  The son of a bitch can burn, for all—

 

“…he fell.  Fighting Lucifer.  A long time ago, now.”

 

Dean clenches his jaw, hands fisting.

 

There’s a hollow sound in the angel’s voice, as though he’s speaking from a growing distance when he repeats, “You must return to Charming.  The time is short.  The battle is almost upon you.”

 

“And what am I supposed to do in this battle?”

 

“That you already know, Dean.”

 

And with a rush of air as of a thousand doves taking flight, the angel is gone.

 

The silence then is deafening.

 

Eventually, Jax removes the cloth, stands naked beside Dean, and says, “You’re right.  They are douchebags.”

 

The ugly sound that leaves Dean then passes for laughter in the world as it now is.

 

Jax touches Dean’s wrist, and Dean turns his head to take in the other man’s face.

 

He can’t figure what Jax is thinking by his expression, but by the nervous way his tongue traces his dry lower lip, Dean guesses Jax is unsure of what to do or say next.

 

Dean can’t blame him.  Angels used to have that effect on him, too.

 

He turns enough to hook an arm behind Jax’s neck and pull him into a rough embrace.  The shock of their naked skin touching toes to shoulders has him rethinking the gesture, but it’s too late.  Jax has wrapped his arms around Dean, one over, one under Dean’s own arms, and his lips are hot against Dean’s neck when he says, “I want to suck you off.”

 

Dean’s dick answers for him, jumping between their pressed bellies, and Jax releases his hold and drops to his knees so quickly that it wrings a gasp from Dean, who’s not ready for the wet heat of Jax’s mouth closing over him.

 

“Holy shit,” he cries, reaching wildly to steady himself on the altar for fear of collapsing.

 

Jax hums his laughter around Dean’s cock and Dean wraps his other hand in Jax’s long hair, fisting it.

  
This brings a deeper sound from Jax’s busy mouth, and Dean moans at the feel of Jax’s tongue working up along the bottom of his cock, and the pressure on the head as it bumps the back of Jax’s throat.

 

Jax works his fingers back to Dean’s sack, weighing his balls in his palm before moving back further, circling Dean’s hole and then pressing inward with the tip of one finger.

  
Dean’s knees shake, and he’s sure he’s going to fall, the sensation too much, the penetration driving spikes of pleasure up through his core, the sucking furnace of Jax’s mouth drawing it forward until he’s certain that he’s going to explode.

 

Jax drives the finger deeper, past the protesting muscles, and it hurts, feels huge and uncomfortable, until Jax distracts him by pulling his mouth away and sucking hard at the head of his cock.

 

The electric sting of too-much makes him jerk, and he cries out, Jax taking all of Dean in again just as he shoves the finger the span of the last knuckle and curls it upward.

 

Dean shouts and comes, Jax’s throat working to swallow as he drives his cock into the man’s open throat and writhes on the single point of Jax’s probing finger.

 

Jax removes his finger just in time to brace Dean’s thighs with both hands.

 

“Easy,” he says, voice rough with abuse and thick with the last of Dean’s seed.

 

Dean realizes then that he’s got Jax’s hair in a vice grip, and he loosens his grasp, running the tips of his fingers along the other man’s scalp in a soothing motion.

 

Jax’s face is turned up, a bead of come at the corner of his mouth, which Jax licks away with an expression of sly relish, never taking his hungry gaze off of Dean’s.

 

Dean’s gaze strays to Jax’s jutting cock, lingers there until Jax makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat.

 

“Lie down,” Dean commands, and Jax does as he’s told, his haste betraying his need.

 

“Didn’t your angel tell you we had somewhere to be?”  He says, once he’s stretched out and waiting.

 

Dean glances at the stained glass window nearest the front of the church.  The faintest grey glow is visible through it.

  
“We have time.”

 

Time is, in fact, the last thing they have, but Dean doesn’t care about that right now.  He kneels gracelessly, knee twingeing, legs still weak with the afterglow of his own profound orgasm, between Jax’s spread thighs and then stretches out above him, pinning Jax’s cock between their hot bellies.

  
Jax makes a breathy sound and tries to shift.  Dean stills him with a thrust of his pelvis, pinning him in place.

 

“Fuck,” Jax grinds out, jaw clenching.    
  
Dean repeats the motion, and Jax bangs the back of his head against the floor.  “Fuck,” he says again, high and tight.

 

“We have time,” Dean repeats, dropping his head to suck blood into the love mark at the base of his throat.

 

“Fuck,” Jax cries again.

  
After that, he’s reduced to blasphemy.

 

***** 

 

 _There comes a time when love isn’t enough to stem the tide of war, when what you see of the future is no longer informed by the past but by the certainty of an end that comes out of all of the choices you failed to make.  The best a man can do when this end arrives is stand to meet it without doubt or uncertainty.  It’s too late for regrets when the wall of darkness rises ahead of you._ (Book of Johns 30:4-6)

 

“Jesus Christ,” Jax breathes, feeling Dean’s weight holding him down, feeling the rough slide of belly hair against his aching cock. 

 

Whatever notions he had about being on top have gone right out of his head, and never mind that he’s never done this before, he’ll take it, take it all if Dean will just finish him off.

  
“Goddamnit, do it, Dean,” He stops himself just short of “Please.”  He will not beg for this.  Will not—

 

“Jesus!”  The shout is torn from him as Dean reaches between them and strokes him hard, to the very edge of pain.  Jax struggles against Dean’s weight, tries to buck up into him, but Dean won’t give him an inch to move.

 

Then he realizes that Dean’s gathering the moisture from the head of his cock, slicking two of his own fingers with it, and he tenses, expecting to feel those fingers at his hole.

  
He’s never done this, but it doesn’t matter, he needs contact of whatever kind.

 

He watches Dean, unable to take his eyes from those glistening digits, as Dean reaches between them.

 

But when he doesn’t feel the press of wet fingers at his opening, he realizes that Dean is doing something else entirely, and he can’t help the, “Jesus fucking Christ” that leaves him them, nor the way his eyes widen.

 

He makes a mighty effort to heave himself up onto his elbows so he can see between them, where Dean is rocking back onto his own fingers, widening the way.

 

“Dean,” he warns, voice shot, thready with desperation, and Dean uses his other hand to grasp the base of Jax’s cock.

  
Fingers inside of himself, holding Jax back, Dean levels him with a dark look and Jax doesn’t even care that he’s whining now, a steady keening noise from his throat.

  
“Fuck, please, Dean.  Please,” and that’s it.  He needs something on his cock or around it or inside of him, whatever, but if he doesn’t get something he’s going to die, he’s sure.  His heart is pounding its way out of his chest, his head swimming with the rushing of blood, and he’s pretty sure he’s about to hyperventilate.

 

Then Dean releases Jax’s cock, spits into his hand, strokes him until he’s wet.

 

Jax slaps both hands flat to the ground to either side of his hips and throws his head back, “Fuck me.  Jesus God fuck me, Dean.  You cocksucking motherfucker, fuck me, Jesus, fuck me.”

 

“Fuck—“

 

Dean throws his legs over Jax’s hips, straddling him, and starts to take Jax in.

 

The heat and pressure distract him, impossibly tight around the head of his cock, and he feels Dean’s resistance.

  
Jax has a second to think it’s got to hurt like fuck, taking him like this, and then Dean is grunting through the pain and sinking down on him, and Jax can’t think after that except in fragments of heat and light, like a live wire arcing in his blood, Dean riding him, groaning filthy words out over their joined flesh, blasphemy and prayer together as Jax pistons his hips in the little space he has, driving up into Dean, grabbing Dean’s hips to steady him, bruising the pale flesh as he grips, pulling Dean down to bounce faster and harder, until he feels the rush at the bottom of his feet, feels the charge race up his legs, pool at the small of his back, and pour out of him.

 

Jax shouts until he’s hoarse, crying out variations on the Lord’s name in a litany of release.

 

He might black out briefly, though he’ll never admit to it.

 

When he opens his eyes, Dean is still straddling him, but he’s pulling away.

 

Dean hisses as Jax slides from his body, and Jax winces in sympathy.  Then he feels the cooling wetness of Dean’s orgasm on his belly and doesn’t feel so bad.

 

“Shit, man, your spooge stinks.”

 

In fact, the air around them is heavy with spunk and sweat, evidence of their loving its own kind of incense at the altar.

 

Dean doesn’t say anything, just stands there, one foot still between Jax’s spraddled legs, an unreadable look on his face.

 

“What?” He asks, finally, running lazy fingers through the pool on his belly.

 

Dean’s eyes follow the movement.

 

Jax catches on, raising one finger slowly, teasingly to his mouth to suck it clean.

 

It’s Dean’s turn to take the Lord’s name in vain, and he moves away a little distance, starts gathering up his clothes.  The light behind the near windows is growing, and though there’s no haste in the other man’s movements, Jax knows that their time in the church is growing short.

 

He’s already got his jeans on and is searching for his tee shirt when he hears Dean say, “Christ,” and then feels him close by and closing.  Jax straightens, starts to turn toward Dean to see what’s wrong, when Dean’s hand on his shoulder blade stops him.

 

Then he’s shivering under the heat of Dean’s hand, which is tracing the lines of the Reaper tattoo on his back.

 

“This is…”  Dean doesn’t finish, and Jax cranes his neck to see Dean’s eyes, wide and fixed, taking in the detail of the ink.

 

Jax gives him a grin. 

 

“Who did this?” Dean asks, wonder evident in his voice.  Jax feels a swelling of pride.

 

“An old Apache my dad knew.  He did my dad’s, too.”

 

Dean is drawing letters on Jax’s skin now, and he can feel the word “Sons” burning into his left shoulder from Dean’s touch.

 

“Stop,” he says, not harshly.  Maybe there’s even some pleading there.  He’s too fucked out to even think about another go-round, but his cock does its best to twitch with interest.

 

Dean’s laugh is low and knowing.  “Later,” he says, and Jax shivers.  This brings another laugh, and Jax feels heat climbing his face.

  
He finds his shirt and pulls it over his head with no small sense of relief, and when he opens his eyes, Dean is holding his cut out for him.

  
“Thanks,” he says, raking his eyes over Dean.

 

Their hands touch as they transfer the leather, and Dean’s smile slips a little.  But the man turns away before Jax can figure out what he’s thinking, and he decides he’s had about enough of emotional moments for now.

 

With a strange fastidiousness and without consulting each other, they start to fold up and stack the vestments and altar cloths, as though someone else might happen by and need them.

 

Then they each blow out a pillar candle and step down from the altar. 

 

Jax catches himself looking back as he moves away, sees Dean doing the same as he shoulders his duffle.  He doesn’t say anything, though, and neither does Dean.

 

When they reach the foyer, they pause.  Dean kicks the fallen chain aside, and it clinks loudly in the enclosed space.

  
“Ready?”

 

Jax isn’t sure.  He knows they can’t stay in the church forever.  An angel of the Lord—a fucking _angel_ —told them so.  But there’s something tempting in the notion of being safe until the very end.

 

It only lasts a second, that temptation, but when he focuses again on Dean’s face, he sees the same resolve blooming there that he feels in himself.

 

They have to finish this thing, whatever this thing is; there are people waiting on them back home.

 

He nods to Dean, who opens one of the two big doors and does his best to look out without risking losing his face.  He gives Jax a nod and moves through the door, gun first.  Jax follows.

 

He doesn’t know what he expects the world outside to look like after a demonic cyclone had played havoc with it, but it’s not the scene they’re greeted with.

  
It’s another clear, sunny day, the sky a brilliant blue, high white clouds drifting on a light breeze.  There’s no evidence that the world had come yet closer to the brink of destruction the night before.

 

The Jeep is where they left it, intact, not a new mark anywhere on its rusty exterior, at least that Jax can see.

  
They’re inside and starting her in another second, on the road a few after that.

 

The trip back toward Charming, detour and all, is alarmingly normal, so that by the time they arrive within a mile of his home, Jax’s hands are wet on the wheel, his breath short, eyes straining as if he can see that far ahead.

 

Beside him, Dean says, “Oh, fuck,” and when Jax turns to see what Dean is taking in, follows the direction of his attention, he sees a cloud of black, impenetrable, shot through with bloody light, surrounding the town.

 

“Fuck,” Jax says, but there’s no energy in it.  He sounds resigned already.  While he was fucking his brains out on the floor of a church, his town was being surrounded by ultimate evil.

 

“Fuck,” he repeats, braking and dropping the Jeep into park.

 

They idle awhile in silence.

 

“What do we do now?” He asks eventually, not really expecting an answer.  Dean’s a fucking encyclopedia of the strange, but even he can’t possibly have a solution for this problem.

 

“Drive.”

 

“What?”

 

“Drive ahead.  It’ll let us through.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

“I just do.  Trust me, okay?”

 

And there it is.

 

Jax stares out over the pitted hood of the Jeep at the rotten swarm swallowing his town, thinking about the people inside it, his mom, Op, all of them.  His responsibility.  And it comes down to this:  trusting someone he doesn’t really know who is probably not telling him the whole truth.

 

Jax had listened to Dean’s memories of Sam, had heard a lot that wasn’t being said.  He’d felt even in Dean’s touch, even at the height of their mutual pleasure, that there was a part of Dean that the man held back from him and from the world.

 

And that had been fine for fucking, for sharing a dark night in a safe haven, but this is different.  This is everything he’s ever loved in mortal peril.

 

The V8 works itself over, something slipping in the gears.

 

Jax doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word, but Dean reads in his posture the accusation he’s not voicing.

 

“I— …Look, there are things you don’t understand.  And maybe I should tell you about them.  But right now, you just gotta trust me that I know what I’m doing.  Drive through that cloud and we’ll be fine.  We’ll get you home.”

 

Jax turns to take in Dean’s expression, and he sees there a kind of mute pleading.  The hooded look in the hunter’s eyes is still prominent, but beside it is something else, a new vulnerability, maybe put there by Jax’s hands on his body, by Jax inside him, calling his name out in an echoing church.

 

“Okay.”

 

Dean nods and turns to look out the passenger window, hiding again, and Jax puts the Jeep in drive and moves ahead.

 

They reach the very edge of the cloud in minutes, and its grey tendrils reach out as if to pull them in and swallow them alive.

 

Beside him, Dean makes a noise, and Jax turns to see the man’s chest glowing.

 

As they penetrate the darkness and red lightning spears the ground on all sides, he glances out of his peripheral to see a smoking hole eating its way out toward the edges of Dean’s tee shirt.

 

Dean’s got his jaw clenched, and there are tears on his cheeks, steadily leaking from the corners of his eyes.

 

Jax can’t make out what’s happening, but he eases up on the gas pedal, concerned to see Dean’s hands white-knuckled on the seat belt.

 

“Drive,” he wheezes through clenched teeth.  “Drive.”

 

Jax steps on it again, and though the Jeep is buffeted like giant hands shoving them around the road, and though the lightning comes faster, forking out at them in crackling arcs, the Jeep itself remains untouched.

  
The glow from Dean’s side is blinding now, and he can hear over the sounds of the unnatural storm Dean whimpering on every exhaled breath.  He presses the gas pedal to the floor, risking flipping to try to get them to the safety of the town limits sooner.

 

By the time he arrives at the junker bunker, Dean is keening from the back of his throat and clawing at the fabric of the bench seat.

 

Jax starts to talk as he slows down to take the tight turns, soothing nonsense words that mean nothing.  “Easy, we’re almost there, take it easy, hang in there, man, almost there.”  By the time they’re traversing the minefield, Dean’s screaming from behind a blinding curtain of light that hurts Jax’s eyes to look at.

 

Then they’re inside the town boundaries and the light flashes off, burning afterimages into Jax’s sight that he can’t blink away.

 

Around the spots in his vision he sees Dean slumped against the shoulder harness, his shirt a smoking ruin, his chest a blistered mess.

 

Nestled in the midst of blackened skin and burnt muscle is a golden charm, fused there as if by the heat of its own burning.  But Jax remembers limning its dimension with his fingers, Dean stretched out beneath him in the pale candlelight, and the way Dean moved his hand away as if it bothered him or made him uncomfortable.

 

“Fuck,” Jax breathes, and then, impatiently, “C’mon already!”  He’s waiting for approving lightning.

 

It occurs to him only after the delay has gone overlong that perhaps it’s not approval they’re going to win.  But by then the peal of thunder overhead is competing with the demonic swarm at his back for which can deafen them permanently.

 

Clean white electric arcs from the sky, geysering clods of asphalt onto the hood, and then it’s finished and he’s driving again, taking the corner too fast, Dean’s head thudding against the window, and then he’s at St. Thomas, where there are still doctors and nurses to tend the sick and wounded.

 

He drives right up onto the sidewalk by the always-open sliding doors, kept that way by broom handles jammed into the tracks, since the electric is spotty at best and they can’t count on it when they need it most.

 

There’s a nurse there to meet him, and he says, “Burn unit.  It’s bad,” as he wrestles Dean’s dead weight out of the Jeep and onto a gurney an orderly in jeans and a Grateful Dead tee shirt has wheeled up.

 

Dean’s hustled away from him in a heartbeat, Jax left standing, hands helplessly clenched, wanting to follow but knowing that he can’t help him anymore.

 

A nurse, nametag telling him she’s “Sarah,” approaches to get information, and bitterness rises with bile in his throat when he realizes just how little he knows.

 

It’s never bothered him, all the pussy he’s had, half the time not sure of the girl’s real name, not caring, either.  But what happened last night, that morning…Jax shakes it off.  He’s got other priorities.  His town is still clouded by unnatural night, evil lightning, swarms of black that remind him too much of the thing that killed Clay.

 

He gives her his number—the local hard-wired phones still work the old-fashioned way—with instructions to call if there’s any change or if Dean wakes up.

 

Then he’s back in the Jeep and heading for the clubhouse.  The interior smells of charred flesh, and he rolls his window down, trying to block out the sounds of Dean’s pain, the way he struggled against the burning.

 

The way he went into it willingly, knowing what was going to happen.

 

“Fuck,” Jax says to himself, and then again, louder, until he’s shouting, pounding one fist repeatedly against the ceiling of the cab, his hand aching with the impact.

 

He calms himself with great effort when he turns on to the driveway to the garage, is mostly okay when he gets to the line of bikes and parks the Jeep.  He’s got to keep it together.  There’s shit going down and their best shoveler is bleeding at St. Thomas.

 

Gemma meets him by the office.  “What happened?  Where’s Dean?  Are you okay, baby?”

 

Jax waves her off, heads for the clubhouse.  “Come inside, Mom.  General meeting.”  That means everyone associated with the club, sweetbutts included.

 

Gemma turns to fetch Half-Sack, who’s working at the engine stand.  Opie’s already halfway out of the next bay, wiping his hands on a rag.

 

He falls in beside Jax as they head for the clubhouse door.

  
“You okay?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Dean?”

 

“I’m only tellin’ this once, Ope.”

 

Ope’s tone changes, as if he hears something Jax is trying real hard to keep to himself.

 

“I’ll get Kerry and J.C. from the back.”

 

Jax nods, and his head feels tight on his neck.  He wants to scream and punch something, but he lets it out with a breath when he sees Tig on the couch, eyes tight shut, body convulsing.

  
Juice is sitting on the coffee table, bracing the man at the shoulders to keep him from jittering onto the floor.

  
“What’s goin’ on?”

 

Juice glances up, but he’s busy.  Chibs answers from the bar.  “Since the cloud descended, he’s been either screamin’ or doin’ this.”

 

He looks to Bobby for confirmation.  Bobby nods.  “Juice got some words down before it got too bad.”

 

“Somethin’ about the final battle,” Piney adds from his seat at a round table.  His voice is sepulchral, words slurred.  There’s a half-empty bottle in front of him.

 

“Jesus, I’m gone a day and all hell breaks loose.”

 

His word choice is deliberate, and it wrings a strangled half-laugh from Bobby and Chibs.  Piney just downs another shot and ignores him.

 

Ope brings the girls up from the back, sans Rita, who’s taking care of Ellie today, and Gemma and Half-Sack hurry in.  Everyone gathers in the bar area, at tables or on stools, except Juice and Tig.  The latter has stopped convulsing, but his head is still thrashing from side to side, and he’s letting out a steady moan.

 

“Poor baby,” Gemma says, sitting down at the place Juice has vacated for her.  “I can listen from here, Jax.”

 

Jax nods as Juice joins them, flipping a chair around to straddle it backwards.

 

“We made it to Lodi with a demonic storm on our asses and holed up in the church Tig picked out for us.  Sanctuary’s real.”  He sees a couple of the guys nod, sees Ope give it grudging approval.  One for Dean.

 

“Stayed there the night.  ‘bout dawn, an angel shows up and tells us we have to head back to Charming.”

 

“An angel?”  Derision is so thick in Piney’s voice Jax thinks he could pluck it out of the air.

 

“Wings ‘n all,” Jax drawls lazily, provoking.  He’s sick of being questioned on this shit, and Dean let himself get barbecued so Jax could be here to tell them the news.

 

“I saw one once,” Half-Sack chips in, fingers pinching his lower lip nervously.  “In Iraq.  When I got hit.  It had these enormous wings.”  He holds his hands out as wide as he can, shakes his head at how poor an imitation that is. 

 

Jax nods.  “Yeah, it was pretty fucked up.  Anyway, it said we had to come back to Charming, so we high-tailed it out of the church, made it to within a mile, saw the cloud.  When’d that start?”

 

“Just at dawn,” Gemma answers from across the room.  “I was making coffee behind the bar when Tig started screaming about the end.  Said there were demon crows come to pick at our flesh.”  Her mouth is a grim line, eyes half-focused as she remembers.

 

“Aye, and an angel with a sword in his mouth,” Chibs adds.

 

“That’s from Revelation,” Bobby chips in.  They all look at him.

  
“What, a Jew can’t read the New Testament now and then?”

 

“How’d you get through the cloud?” Ope asks, and his eyes are careful, assessing, like he already suspects the answer.

 

Jax keeps his eyes on his best friend and VP when he tells it:  Dean asking for Jax’s trust, his insistence that they drive into the cloud, the way he burned.  The way he made Jax keep going despite his pain.  He leaves out the part about the screaming.

 

Gemma seems to hear it anyway.  “He’s gonna be okay, baby.  Have faith.”

 

Jax cuts her a look.  His mother didn’t used to talk about faith.

 

Then again, his mother didn’t used to spend her time tending to a blind prophet, either.

 

Tig’s restlessness has been reduced to sporadic jerks of his head and low moans, Gemma’s hand smoothing his sweaty hair back.

 

“I mean it, Jax.  He’s got powerful guardians.  And he’s in the prophecy.”

 

About that—“Anything else from Tig?”

 

“No, just the same from before,” Juice says, flipping open the notebook from church, which Bobby has retrieved and tossed over to him.  “The Mother of Sorrows will stay the hand of the enemy.  One son will die.  The other will bring the end of the end.”

 

Jax lets his face go blank, not wanting to reveal what he’s feeling. 

 

Ope says, “He could be the one who dies.”

 

Jax pins him.  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

 

But there’s been a sea change in Ope.  He holds his hands up in concession.  “I just mean that if one of you is marked for death, I’d rather it be him, Jax.”

 

There’s nodding of various degrees all around the room.  J.C. and Kerry are sitting very quietly, watching Jax with wide, nervous eyes. 

 

The tension is broken by the phone behind the bar ringing.  The local land line.  Kerry’s the closest.  “Hello?  Uh-huh.  Yeah.”  She looks at Jax.  “It’s the hospital.”

 

Jax tries not to bolt from his seat, tries to walk with the same deliberation as usual, but it’s hard.  His heart is climbing his throat and he feels a little sick.  Still, his hand doesn’t shake when he takes the receiver.  “This is Jax.”

 

“He’s awake and asking for you,” Sarah says.

 

“I’ll be right there.”

 

“Does he need to come with me?” Jax is asking Gemma, pointing to Tig, even as he’s handing the receiver back to Kerry to hang it up.

 

Gemma shakes her head.  “No, he’s sleeping now.  We’ll give him his meds when he wakes up.”

 

Jax says, “No.  We need him awake and clear-headed.  If he wakes up while I’m out, get him talking.  Give him aspirin or something, but not the strong shit.  Juice, write down whatever he tells you.  Who’s got patrol tonight?”

 

Bobby and Ope raise their hands.  “Piney, Chibs, you back ‘em up.  Ope, get ahold of Hale, see if he’s adding security, too.”

 

His VP nods.

 

“I’ll be back when I can.”

 

Ope catches up when he’s halfway to his bike.  The tall man ducks a little, like if he doesn’t, he’ll brush the malevolent black sky overhead.  Though the sun is invisible to them, there’s light, a sickly, pale imitation of daylight, washing the color out of everything, living or inanimate.  
  
“Jax…”

 

“Not now, Ope.”

 

“Jax.”

 

Jax spins on him, eyes flashing, but Ope’s hands are at his sides, his eyes careful, almost deferent.

 

“Do you want someone with you, in case…?”  It’s clear he doesn’t want to finish the sentence, but Jax knows where it’s going.

 

“Why?”  He says it defensively.  He knows he’s being an asshole, but he can’t seem to stop.

 

“Because you care about Dean, and he might die.”

 

This is the new Ope right here, the one who talks about shit, who comes at it from the angle of a guy who’s been there himself.  Jax can’t take the compassion on Opie’s face, the way his friend obviously wants to help.

  
Clenching his jaw to keep his chin from shaking, blinking furiously to reduce the shine, Jax blows out a breath and says, “No, I got it.  But thanks, Ope.”  He slaps Opie on the chest twice and then strides fast to his bike. 

 

He doesn’t even remember the six minute ride.

 

He leaves the bike on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, out of the way of the town’s one ambulance but close enough that he can get to it fast if he needs to.

 

At the desk, a frazzled-looking woman on the phone saying, “Please, sir, could you repeat—,” waves him toward the elevator and holds up two fingers.  Second floor.

 

At the nurse’s station, Sarah is nowhere to be seen, but an older lady with a bad dye job is sitting behind the desk working on a crossword and keeping an eye on the ICU monitors.

 

“Dean Winchester,” Jax says, throat dry with worry.

 

“Room 212,” and by the time she points, he’s already moving toward the room.  He’s spent plenty of time at St. Thomas over the years.  Too much time.

 

Sarah’s in the room with Dean, hanging a bag of clear fluid.  She looks up when he enters and turns to Dean. 

 

“He’s here.”

 

She sounds like she’s relieved to be saying it, and he wonders how much trouble Dean’s been giving her.

 

“Hey,” he says, seeing Dean’s eyes on him.

 

“Hey,” Dean answers, voice hoarse.  The white of the thin hospital cotton does nothing to improve the sallowness of Dean’s skin or the dark hollows under his eyes.  Every scar—and the man has many—stands out in greater relief for the glow of the recessed fluorescent on the wall over the bed.

 

“How you feelin’?”  It’s a stupid question.

  
“I have a lot more sympathy for lobster,” he answers, the corner of his mouth ticking up. 

 

Jax stands awkwardly at the bed rail, hands resting on it, not sure what he’s supposed to do now.  If Dean were a woman, he’d offer a comforting touch, but Dean’s decidedly not the chick in this situation, and it’s beyond him how he should act.

 

Dean resolves it by saying, “You think you can bust me outta this place?”

 

Jax smirks.  “The ICU?”

 

“The hospital, man.  I fucking hate ‘em.”

 

Jax laughs at that.  “Yeah, me too.  But I think you probably have to be here for awhile.”

 

“Nah, man, I’m fine.  Ask Sarah.  She’ll tell you.”  Dean nods toward the door, and Jax turns to see the nurse standing there, clipboard in hand.  She gestures to draw Jax out into the hallway.

 

They move to stand near the family waiting area, empty now.  The floor is quiet, an irony of the apocalypse.  Fewer people means fewer accidents and injuries. 

 

“How is he?”

 

Sarah doesn’t beat around the bush.  “He’s a miracle.”

 

And the way she says it leads Jax to wonder exactly how well Dean is.  She’s talking like she spent last night with the man.

 

His amusement must show, because she blushes a little and flusters.

 

“No, I mean…healing-wise.  The doctor tried to remove the charm from his chest, but every time he got near it with the scalpel, Dean’s vital signs went crazy, and eventually we had to give up.  There’s no way to get it out of there.”

 

Jax gives a tight little nod.  He’d suspected something like this.

 

“But that’s not the weirdest part.  He’s healing.  The burns are healing much more rapidly than they should.  He had third degree burns, extensive muscle and tissue damage.  In places, the heat seared him to the bone.  That’s all healed.  No signs of infection, either.  At this rate, he’ll be good as new—relatively speaking.  He can probably go home tomorrow.”

 

“No chance I could get him out earlier?”

 

She laughs like he’s joking and then sobers when she realizes he’s not.

 

“He nearly died this morning.”

 

Jax shrugs.  “You seen his scars?  That’s the story of his life, Sarah.  Dean needs to get out of here.  We have work to do.  Important work.”  He uses every ounce of his latent charm, gives her what Gemma used to call his “for the good of the people” expression.

 

She softens.

 

“Maybe.  But it would be against the doctor’s recommendation.”

 

Neither of them says that the doctor has no real authority.  The hospital administrators, by and large, lived in pricey subdivisions outside the town limits.  Most of them didn’t survive the apocalypse.  The ones who did don’t have a salary and their skill set isn’t survivalist in nature. 

 

In other words, there’s no one who’s going to stop Jax from leaving with Dean.

 

Still…it doesn’t hurt to keep the medical staff happy.

 

“How about we give him a few hours, see how he is around dinner?”

 

She nods, relieved to have the immediate decision out of her hands.  “Okay.  The doctor will be by again at 3:00.  Check back after that.”

 

Jax watches Sarah return to the nurse’s station and then goes back to Dean’s room.  He’s not surprised to find the man asleep.

 

Pulling a chair up, Jax settles in.  He doesn’t need to be there—has places he should be, things he should be doing, in fact—but he wants to stay awhile, some instinct in him insisting.

 

He’s been watching Dean sleep for maybe twenty minutes when he realizes there’s someone standing in the doorway.  Peering around the edge of the chair, he sees a nurse’s aid in an aqua blue uniform and white sneakers.  Behind her, Jax can see a cart of some kind.

 

He rises to face her.

 

“You probably don’t remember me,” she says in a whisper, voice meek and hesitant.

 

She takes a couple of careful steps into the room, like he might attack her or something.  He can just make out the name on her tag:  Wendy.

 

He should know her.  Hell, he should know everyone.  The population of Charming, California, might be the last people left alive on earth.

 

A vague memory stirs in the back of his brain, but he can’t seem to pin it down.

 

She smiles, self-deprecating, and twists her long hair nervously with two fingers.

 

“You saved my life two years ago.”

 

And like floodwaters, the memory rises.  A skinny, strung out kid, soaked to the skin from the torrential rains they were suffering through, throwing herself in front of the Jeep as he came back in from a grocery run.  He’d barely missed her, had had to run off the road and ended up gutting the exhaust on a low curb.

 

He’d charged out of the Jeep cursing only to find her on her knees sobbing in the street.

 

Her story, what he’d been able to patch together through her meltdown, was a familiar one:  she’d been in town when the plague came, so she’d survived.  But her brother’d been in Vegas, her sister in New Orleans, her boyfriend working a landscaping gig out at one of the new subdivisions.

 

In the four months since she’d lost everyone she’d ever loved, she’d tried to adjust to life alone, but she hadn’t been especially good at living to begin with, and the circumstances of besieged Charming didn’t give her much hope.

 

They’d had a lot of suicides the first few months after the plague.

 

A lot more after that, too, when people realized how life was going to be from now on.

 

“You look good,” he says, and he means it.  She’s clearly cleaned up, and she’s working, put on a little weight.  Another time, he’d be all over that, for sure.

  
Now, though.  His eyes stray back to Dean, who’s murmuring a little, shifting his head on the pillow.

 

“I’ll let you get back to him.  I just wanted to say thank you.  I never did, before.”

 

That’s an understatement.  Once he’d picked her up out of the road and bundled her into the Jeep, she’d come at him claws first, shrieking, calling him every name he’d ever heard and some that were new even to him.  It had been a long ride to the police station, where he’d dumped her on Hale.

 

“You’re welcome, Wendy.  I’m glad you made it.”

 

She nods, smiling wide and shy, and ducks her head.  “Me, too.”

 

“See ya around, maybe.”

 

“Yeah,” she answers, a little breathless.

 

Another time, another place…

 

“Dude, you’re so in!”

 

Jax turns to find Dean’s eyes open, smirk on his face, shadow-bruised eyes alight.

 

Jax shakes his head.  “No, thanks. I got enough needy bitches around me.”  But he softens it with a finger on the smooth skin of Dean’s near wrist.

 

Dean’s smirk loses a little of its lightness, turning into consideration as Jax continues the touch.

 

“You just want my Jell-O,” Dean tries, but it comes out breathy, losing its effect.

 

Jax moves his hand away and then breathes through the feeling that he’s done something wrong.  Whatever this is between them, it’s powerful.

 

“You knew it was going to French fry you.”  It’s not a question.

 

Dean’s jaw muscles jump, but he nods, breathes out a resigned sigh, says, “Yeah.”

 

“It happened before?”

 

Another nod.  “Not as bad as this, but yeah.”

 

“Goddamnit, man, warn a guy next time you’re going to go human torch on him, huh?”

 

Dean looks up, smile altogether gone now.  He raises his hand as far as he can with the IV line running into the back of it and runs a finger down the back of Jax’s where it rests on the bedrail.

 

“Deal.”

 

“Better yet, try not to get yourself hurt at all, dumbass.”

 

“That’s a promise I can’t keep.”

 

Jax nods, his jaw tight now, grinding down on what he wants to say, on the feeling welling in his stomach at the memory of Dean burning beside him.

 

“I gotta go,” he says, “But I’ll be back.  Sarah thinks I can spring you around 3:00.  ‘til then, don’t harass the help, alright?”

 

Dean makes a so-so motion with his other hand.  “Can’t promise that, either.”

 

“I’ll make sure you get the real Jell-O.”

 

“Deal,” Dean repeats, smiling.

 

But the man’s eyes are already closing when Jax looks back at him from the door, where he’s hesitated, feeling like he’s abandoning Dean to his fate.  Stupid, he knows, but he can’t shake it.  It takes a lot longer to get back to his bike than it should.

 

He spends the rest of the day fielding reports from last night’s patrol, talking to Hale on the land line about security details, and helping his mom take care of Tig, who hasn’t regained consciousness.  The man’s blind eyes are half-lidded, pale blue light like the inside of an eggshell just visible in the opening.  When he passes his hand in front of Tig’s face, he swears the blown-out pupils track the motion.

 

He pulls his mom aside.  “He say anything else about me or Dean?”

 

She shakes her head.  “Poor baby’s all screwed up, Jax.  He’s not making any kind of sense.”

 

Jax nods, eyes abstracted as he thinks about how much they don’t know.

 

Early afternoon, Chibs and Ope report in from their circuit of the perimeter.

 

“Things are holding,” Ope says, “But the cloud seems lower and more violent.  And out by the bunker there’s movement, almost like something’s trying to come out of the cloud.”

 

 _Great_ , Jax thinks.  _What was that Dean said about dragons_?

 

To the guys he only says, “Get some rest.  You’ll have patrols all night, rotating shifts, with Hale’s guys.”

 

Hale doesn’t actually have “guys” so much as he leads a glorified neighborhood watch program, but the men—and a few women—who ride around in pick-ups all have weapons training and have already proven themselves capable of following orders.  It’s like Charming’s own little standing army.

 

“That’d be advice you’d do well to follow yourself,” Bobby says from his usual seat at a round table near the bar. 

 

It’s true, he’s feeling the lack of sleep from the night before.  What he and Dean managed wasn’t exactly unbroken, what with angelic visitations and holy fucking and all.

 

He snorts at what his head must look like inside, catches Bobby giving him a curious look.

  
“Yeah, I’ll hit the sack for an hour.  Knock if you need me.”

 

When he gets to his room, he finds a naked Rita stretched out in his bed.  She’s asleep, and he hates to wake her, but he’s not up for company, at least, not present company.

 

She goes away with a pout, which he relieves by smacking her on her bare ass as she bundles her clothes into a ball and heads for the can to get dressed.

 

Usually, Jax can’t nap, his brain refusing to shut down while there’s any reason for it to be awake, but he must be more tired than he thought because he doesn’t even remember his head hitting the pillow.

 

Next thing he knows, Gemma is sitting on the side of his bed shaking his shoulder gently.  “Baby, you gotta wake up.  It’s almost three.”

 

“Fuck,” he groans, swimming up out of the obliterating dark of deep sleep.  He scrubs a hand over his face and hauls himself up on his elbows.  “Everything okay?”

 

Gemma smiles.  “We’re fine, Jax.  Tig’s asleep—really asleep this time.  I think he’s gonna be okay.  But you’d better get your ass in gear.  ‘Wendy’ from the hospital called and said your Dean was being a pain in the ass.”

 

Her use of the possessive doesn’t escape Jax’s notice, but he’s too drugged out on exhaustion to call her on it. 

 

He nods and swings his legs over the side while his mother fusses with the clothes scattered in various places around his room.  “You don’t have to do that, Mom.  I’ll take care of it later.”

 

She gives him a leveling look.  “Later my ass.  You’re waiting for the end of the world so you don’t have to do your laundry.  Get out of here before the doctor decides to do elective surgery on some part of Dean you might want to keep attached.”

 

He blushes at this, catches her mischievous look, ducks his head.

 

As he passes, she grabs his arm and plants a kiss on his cheek, leans up to whisper, “He’s good for you,” in his ear.

 

He has no idea how his mother can say that, how anyone can know that when Dean’s only been around a couple of days, but he lets it go.  There’s only so much he can figure out at one time, and the vagaries of his relationship with his mother—or with Dean, for that matter—aren’t on the plate for now.

 

Maybe after he prevents the end of the world.

 

Jax gets off the elevator on the second floor expecting to hear Dean’s voice from down the hall.  But when silence and an empty nurse’s station greet him instead, he starts jogging, afraid of what he’s going to find.

 

It’s not at all what he had been envisioning.

 

Dean’s asleep, stretched out on the bed in a pair of Jax’s jeans and one of his “Sons” tee-shirts, the closest thing to clean he could find.  He’d had Sack drop them off earlier, along with a gun, which he can just see peeking out from beneath Dean’s pillow.  His boots are on the floor at the end of the bed, clean socks perched on top of them. 

 

He lets out a breath and leans in the doorway, watching Dean sleep.  It’s a girly thing to do, and it should embarrass him, but he can’t help it. 

Jax has always hated hospital beds for the way they rob a man of his vitality, leave him looking doll-like and vulnerable.  No one who’d seen Dean on his feet would make the mistake of thinking he was soft or easily hurt.  But like this, flat on his back, even in his borrowed street clothes, the man looks permeable, impermanent.

 

A frisson of alarm travels to Jax’s belly and settles there like ice needles, pricking him, when he remembers the prophecy.  He doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want to lose Dean, either.

 

Which is ridiculous.  He’s known the man three days.

 

And yet…

 

Maybe that’s what Tig meant when he said Jax would know Dean.  Maybe the things that make them alike also bind them together.

 

Jax is grateful for the little, lost sound Dean makes in his sleep then for the way it diverts him from the path of his thoughts.

 

Dean moans and Jax closes the distance between them, leans on the edge of the bed.  The skin around Dean’s mouth is white, and a vein under his eye is jumping.  He can see Dean’s pupils darting under the delicate skin of his closed lids.

 

Jax reaches out a hesitant hand and again strokes the soft skin on the inside of Dean’s wrist and then runs his fingers lightly up his inner arm.  When he reaches the edge of the tee shirt sleeve, he moves his fingers to Dean’s neck and then ghosts the tips over his cheekbones and strokes them across his forehead.

  
The lines smooth out and Dean’s eyes flutter open, a moment of confusion driven away by the sight of Jax so close.

 

He withdraws his hand.

  
“Hey,” Dean says, having to clear his sleep-rough throat before he continues.  “You ready to bust me outta here?”

 

“You willing to ride bitch?”

 

“If it means I can go home, hell yeah.”

 

Dean’s word choice seems to strike them both at the same time.

  
“I mean—“

 

“I know what you meant,” Jax says, soft.  “It’s alright.”  And that’s going to have to do for all the unsaid things, like, “It’s your home for as long as you want it,” and “You belong with me.”

 

Jax backs off to let Dean swing his legs over the side, but he’s near enough to catch him if he loses his balance when he touches the floor.  He seems steady enough, though, and Jax picks up his boots while Dean stows his gun in the back of his pants and then sits in the chair to put his boots on.

 

Jax can see the large white square of a gauze bandage on Dean’s chest under his shirt, sees by the man’s careful movements in bending and tying that he’s still not a hundred percent.  He won’t ask, though, knows Dean would only bullshit him.  And besides, there are more pressing matters to contend with than some fast-healing burns, no matter how bad they were to begin with.

 

Dean submits with poor grace to the wheelchair that Wendy brings up as they hit the nurse’s station.

 

“Policy,” she says, and Jax smirks at Dean’s expense while Dean glowers. 

 

Outside, Dean glances up at the sky, scans the parking area where the wan light paints everything ugly.  “Nice,” he says.

 

Jax snorts.

 

Dean’s surprisingly quiet about climbing on the back of the bike, rests his hands on Jax’s waist without a word.

 

“Hold tight and don’t lean on the curves,” he instructs, and still Dean says nothing.

 

Not until they’re back at the clubhouse does he speak, and then it’s just to say, “Thanks for the ride.”

 

There are tension lines at his forehead and around his mouth, and Jax can’t tell if it’s pain or something else putting them there.  He wants to ask, but Half-Sack jogs out of the garage just then and says, “Hey, welcome back,” slapping Dean lightly on the shoulder.  “Ope fixed up her suspension.  She’s smooth as a dream now.”

 

Dean’s eyes light up and then narrow suspiciously.  He spins to take in the sight of the Impala, eyes raking over her like he’ll find a new scratch or ding.  “You drove her?”

 

Sack betrays his guilt by shuffling a little and staring hard at the ground.

 

“Uh-huh.  Just to make sure she was fixed, though.”

 

Dean breaks out a smile, says, “She’s a great car, isn’t she?”

 

And like that, Jax is outside the chatter, watching the two as they walk toward the clubhouse together.

 

Dean looks ten years younger with that expression of joy on his face.

  
It doesn’t last.

 

Tig is sitting up on the couch, milky eyes fixed on Dean and Jax as they enter the big room.

 

“The Sons of John appear like sun from behind an evil cloud.”

 

He looks hard at the former Enforcer, wondering if this is the voice of prophecy or jackassery at work.

  
Tig’s expression is blank, though, and Jax realizes the man is still channeling the big guy upstairs.

 

“How long’s he been like this?” He asks Juice, who’s scribbling furiously in the notebook. 

 

“Just since you left.  But it’s been non-stop.”

 

“Anything new?”

 

Juice waves the pen in Tig’s direction and goes back to writing.

 

“They’ll drive the darkness back.  And a challenger will come to meet them at the gate.  And he will be son and brother, brother and son.  None shall stand but two before him, and all shall look upon him with great fear.  The strong shall tremble and the meek shall crawl.

 

Only the Mother of Sorrows will withstand the terror to come before all evil and drive his host away.”

 

“Variations on a theme, I take it?” Dean asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You gotta let me see that book.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

He’s distracted by Tig’s nonstop “this is your future life” spiel and by Gemma’s worried frown, a shadow of the sadness on her face reminding him how fragile she really is.  Distracted, too, by the way Opie’s got his arms crossed in front of his chest and is leaning against the bar staring at them both.

 

“Dude,” Dean says, low, eyes going to Jax’s neck.

  
Which is when he realizes that his tee-shirt is askew.  He can feel the hot spot where Dean sucked the blood to the surface, knows that everyone has seen it by now.

  
Hopes most of them will think he didn’t kick Rita out of his bed a couple of hours ago.

 

“Mom, I can do that,” he says, seeing the way her hands shake at Tig’s frantic words, the way her eyes are clouded with sorrow.

 

“I’m okay, baby.”

 

“No, you’re not.” He stills her damp hands and takes the cloth from her, urging her to stand up and handing her over to Chibs, who puts an arm around her slender waist and says, “C’mere, darlin’,” in that way he has of charming all the ladies with his indecipherable accent.

 

Jax takes her seat, rinses the cloth in cool water, wrings it out.  He looks up to find Dean sitting at a table with Half-Sack.  Whatever he’s saying has the kid riveted.  Dean can take care of himself.

 

The second his fingers brush Tig’s forehead, his eyes roll up in his head and he slumps sideways on the couch.

 

“Jesus, what’d you do to him?” Juice asks.

 

Piney snorts from his place at the bar.  “Just be glad he finally shut up.”

 

Bobby laughs a little, finishes laying out a game of old-school solitaire at his table.

 

Jax levers Tig’s legs up on the couch and covers him with an afghan they keep there for that purpose.

  
“Jesus, man,” he murmurs, looking at the dark circles under Tig’s eyes, at the way the furrows of his scars stand out white against the fever-flush of his cheeks. 

 

“It’s killing him,” Gemma says.  Chibs, a few feet behind her, raises his hands helplessly.

 

Jax stands and leads her back toward the bar.  “You eaten today?”

 

“I’m not an invalid, Jax.  I can take care of myself, you know.”

 

He does know.  Or rather, he used to know that, before she went all biblical on him.

 

He releases her elbow and raises his hands in the universal signal for “Whatever.”

 

“Dean,” he says, short and sharp, taking the notebook from in front of Juice and jerking his head in the direction of church.

 

Dean says something to Sack that has the kid grinning and then gets up to follow Jax in, sliding the door closed behind them.

 

They sit across the table from each other, to either side of the head chair, where no one sits, and Jax slides the notebook over to him.  “The entries are all dated.  A lot of them are complete bullshit, but you might be able to make out a pattern the rest of us missed.”

 

Dean flips the notebook open to near the back, where the most recent entries are, and starts working his way backward through it.  Ten minutes in, he gets up, says, “I gotta get something.  Be right back.”

 

He reappears a minute later with his Dad’s journal, which he flips open, searching for something.  He taps the page when he finds what he wants and starts looking from notebook to journal and back again.

 

Jax has never been the patient sort, and after six or seven minutes of this, he gets up.  “I’m going out for a smoke.”

 

Dean just nods acknowledgement, apparently absorbed in what he’s doing.

 

Irritated, though he shouldn’t be—guy’s doing them a favor, after all, not like he didn’t just get out of the hospital, either—Jax passes through the bar without a word to anyone, heads down the hall.

 

Ope calls, “Jax?”

 

“Smoke break,” he calls back, making it clear from his tone that he doesn’t want company.

 

Outside, the sky is completely shrouded in black that is somehow darker than the night, which falls early lately.  He can make out the glow of the police station, which has its own generator, and here and there the scattered security lights on homes that have solar power.  It occurs to him that those people are going to be shit out of luck if the cloud holds for much longer.

 

He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag, blows the smoke upward, a tiny act of defiance against the enormity of evil hovering over him.

 

When the cigarette’s done, Jax is calmer, laughing at himself for his pettiness.  Dean’s doing a job.  Jax is just pissed that he can’t help.  Couldn’t help at the church, couldn’t keep Dean from burning.  
  
He’d best learn a few things and fast if he’s going to maintain control around here.

 

And there’s the real problem.  Control is an illusion.  He lost it a long time ago, but it took Dean’s arrival—and what Dean does to him, how he upsets something and resettles it every time he looks at Jax a certain way—to really drive it home.

 

Sighing, “This is bullshit,” under his breath and gunning the glowing butt out into the lot, Jax opens the door and goes back inside.

  
Tig’s still out on the couch, he sees, and Gemma has taken a spot at the bar beside Piney.  They’re conferring in low voices.  It makes Jax nervous for some reason, but fuck if he knows why.

 

Dean’s still bent over the books when Jax slides the door open and comes back in, but a second later, he puts his finger in the notebook to hold his place and looks across the table at Jax, who’s settled there again.

 

“So which of us is going to bite it?” He asks without preamble.

 

 *****

 

 

 _I don’t care about my own life.  Death sometimes seems better than the sorry excuse for living I do.  But I don’t want my boys to have to fend for themselves any sooner than they’re likely to need to anyway.  They’re strong enough, maybe, and certainly willing to sacrifice for each other.  God help them if it ever comes to that._ (Book of Johns 23:17-21)

 

It didn’t take Dean long to figure out that a lot of Tig’s so-called prophecies were just the ramblings of a cracked brain.  _Probably all that God-noise fucks him up good_ , Dean thinks.  But here and there is the gleam of truth, truth he supports by consulting some things he remembers in Dad’s journal about end times prophecies.

 

When Jax comes back from his hissy fit—and Dean might be a lot of things, insensitive, obsessive, filthy-minded, but he’s also pretty damned observant—Dean lays it on him.

 

“So which of us is going to bite it?”

 

“Mother of Sorrows” takes no translating, and from what he’s already seen of Gemma, he has no doubt she could raise hell and then spank it into submission if she put her mind to it.

  
And they’ve already firmly established that they’re the “Sons of John.”

 

Dean is trying to read Jax’s look—it’s not alarm, because obviously the guy’s been thinking about this, too.  And it’s not skepticism; no, he’s definitely on board with what Dean’s saying.

 

So what is it?

 

“You want it to be you who’s ‘marked for death’?”

 

Ah, so that’s it.

 

Dean’s been unconsciously rubbing the sore spot under the gauze, but when he catches the drift of Jax’s eyes and words, he stops.

 

“I don’t have a death wish.”  It comes out flat and unconvincing, though.

 

Jax just raises an eyebrow.

 

“I don’t.”  And this time, it’s just plain defensive.  Sighing, Dean tries again.  “Look, it makes sense, okay?  I don’t have anyone to leave behind.  I’ve been on the road, fighting these sons of bitches, since the whole thing started.  You’ve been here, taking care of the people you care about.  If it’s got to be one of us, it should be me.”

 

But Jax, who had started shaking his head halfway through Dean’s little speech, raises eyes that snap with anger.  He jabs a finger at Dean and says, “No.  That’s not how it’s got to be.  These prophecies are riddles, man.  You know that.  Maybe there’s something we’re missing, something we’re not seeing.  And anyway, there’s no saying it won’t be me.”

 

“It shouldn’t be, is all I’m saying,” Dean reiterates, but his voice is tired, low, with some gravel in it.

 

“You want a break?”  Jax is like that, Dean has noticed.  Angry and concerned, sharp-tongued and worried.

 

Complicated.

 

Dean sighs again, not doing much of a case for being okay, but he shakes his head.  “I’m fine.  Let me read some more, see if there’s not something I’m missing.”

 

But another hour’s worth of reading, of collating with Dad’s journal, hell, of consulting _Revelation_ in the ragged-eared copy of the bible Bobby produces from somewhere or other…none of it turns up anything new.

 

Like Dean expected, the most important stuff is what’s repeated again and again.  Sons of John.  Marked for death.  End of the end.

 

Gemma knocks and enters without waiting for a come-ahead, bearing a tray of sandwiches and a couple of beers.

 

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Dean says in his most charming voice.

  
Gemma slaps him playfully on the shoulder.  “Behave.  My son’s in the room.”  And then adds, sotto voce, “See me later.”

 

That gets a laugh out of all three, which makes the food go easier.

  
Dean’s tired, worn down by the morning’s searing pain and by the constant throb in the region of the amulet, which always aches a little at the best of times.  Now, it’s as though the memories the amulet brings are communicated physically through his breastbone, radiating outward in a steady wave of sorrow that drags him down.

  
He could sleep for a week.  If he had a week.

 

“Let’s get some rest,” Jax suggests, snatching the notebook from in front of Dean and closing it, stowing it on the sideboard behind him.

 

Dean follows the progress of the notebook with weary eyes and then rubs his hand down his face.

 

“Yeah, okay.”  He doesn’t really think there’s anything else to find, and he’s not going to be good to anyone if he doesn’t get some sleep tonight.

 

He gets to the sliding door before Jax and then it occurs to him…

 

“Where am I sleeping?”

 

He looks back over his shoulder at Jax, whose face is a study in dispassion.

  
“Wherever you want to, man.  Should I get J.C.?”

 

Dean turns around, puts his back to the sliding door so no one can surprise them, and then surprises them anyway when he kisses Jax, taking his face in both hands, scratch of two-days’ stubble against his palms, beer breath ghosting across his lips as he leans in.

 

It starts out chaste enough, but Jax responds like he’s starved for touch, shoving Dean back into the door, wringing a little noise out of Dean as his sore chest sends up a sharper twinge.

  
Jax doesn’t pause or apologize, though, driving his tongue deep into Dean’s mouth, thrusting his knee between Dean’s two and bringing his thigh up to rub on the growing bulge in Dean’s borrowed jeans.

 

When Jax breaks away, they’re both panting, harsh breaths in the stillness of the room.  Through the door, they hear laughter and talking, the clink of bottles, the sound of pool balls striking. 

 

Jax stares at Dean from inches away, his eyes hot, mouth open and reddened, cheeks flushed.

 

Dean has to clear his throat twice before he says, “Your room’s probably bigger.”

 

Jax nods, swallows hard, gathering himself with a visible effort.

 

Dean says, “You want me to go first, you follow after awhile?”

 

Jax backs up, steps out of the heat of Dean’s atmosphere, like he’s trying to put distance and a coolness of space between them.  But his words counter his actions.

 

“No.  I’ve never been ashamed of the people I care about.  I’m not starting now.”

 

Dean’s heart flips in his chest, electric shooting through him, and he’s not sure how to respond to that, is afraid any answer he makes will be the wrong one.  His uncertainty must be clear on his face.

 

Jax’s sudden, boyish grin dispels the tension.  “Ease up, man, I’m not giving you my letterman’s sweater.”

 

Dean can’t help the short, sharp bark of laughter the remark brings.  He’s tired and has just been kissed drunk.

 

He turns again, checks to see that his borrowed shirt hangs over his obvious hard-on—thinking that Jax’s whole stoner chic look has its uses after all—and opens the door.

 

Sack and Chibs each glance up from where they’re playing cards at a nearby table, but no one else pays them any mind.  Dean sees Gemma sitting in a chair near the sleeping Tig, keeping watch.  Juice is at the bar, Piney and Bobby with him.  Ope is nowhere to be seen. 

 

J.C. gives him an unmistakable look, which Dean returns with a smile and a shake of his head.  Jax gives him a little shove at the small of his back, and Dean sees J.C.’s expression change to one of astonished understanding.  She turns to Rita, who’s working the other end of the bar, and he sees that the second girl, too, has caught on.

 

He swallows a sigh and smiles to himself.  At least he won’t have to disappoint any more naked girls.

 

Naked guys, on the other hand…

 

By the time the door to Jax’s room is closed behind them and he’s struggled out of his boots, Dean feels like a Mack truck has settled on his shoulders.  His breath is shallow from the effort of breathing through the exhaustion.

 

Jax looks at him from across the bed, where he’s slowly stripping out of jeans and cut, and says, “You look like death, man.  Get to bed.  This can wait.”

 

Dean doesn’t have to ask what “this” is; they both have tents in their boxers. 

 

He slides under the covers with a groan of relief and is awake only long enough to feel the bed dip on Jax’s side before he’s drifting into the dark, where the pain in his chest is only a vague warning sign of nightmares waiting to rise to the surface and thrash him in his sleep.

 

Once more, a sound he can’t immediately identify awakens him, and he has a minute of irritation to think, “I’m going to kill the next fucking angel that shows up,” when he realizes it’s low voices he’s making out from the other side of the bedroom door.

 

He stretches out a hand to Jax’s side and finds it empty, the sheets still warm.

 

Sitting up, he lets the covers pool in his lap and rubs a hand over his face.  He feels a little better.  The ache in his chest has subsided to a low throb, like a pulled muscle, and his eyes focus with greater ease on objects in the dark.

 

His boots, one on its side, near the chair in the corner.

 

Jax’s cut, Reaper up, drapes over a desk chair.

 

The door opens, letting in dim light from the hallway, and he hears Jax whisper, “—patrol,” before the biker is sliding silently back into the room.

  
“Hey,” he says, letting Jax know he’s awake.

 

“Sorry.  Didn’t mean to wake you.”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “’salright.  I’m a light sleeper these days.”

 

Jax snorts.  “Can’t imagine why.”

 

“We got patrol?”  Dean asks, nodding toward the door to indicate that he’d overheard some of the conversation.

 

Jax shakes his head.  “Not for awhile.  We’ve got a little time.”

 

Dean lets what he’s thinking curl his lips up in a lewd smirk and is rewarded for it when Jax pulls his tee-shirt over his head and drops his boxers.

 

He takes the time to stare a little while Jax waits for him to slip out of his tee and boxers.  The lamp on the dresser is on, shade covered in a skull-and-crossbones bandanna to cast the room in a diffuse light.  Jax’s skin is burnished, shadows highlighting the cut of his abdomen, the hollow of his breastbone, the dips in his collarbone and lines of his cheeks.

 

Dean feels himself hardening, and Jax must know what he’s doing to him because he’s wearing a canary-eating smile.

 

Slowly, with deliberate provocation, Dean runs his tongue over his lower lip and lays back on the bed, kicking his boxers onto the floor.

  
Jax laughs, a low and breathy sound, desire and need and want all wrapped up in his rough voice, and puts one knee on the bed.

 

Dean can’t help stretching out his hand to wrap it around Jax’s hard cock, tugging gently like a lead chain to bring the other man over to him.  Jax brackets Dean’s head with his hands, lowers his lips to nip at Dean’s shoulder and lick the lightest line of wet around the bandage on his chest.

 

“You okay with this?”

 

“Yeah,” Dean manages, voice high with need as Jax sucks one nipple into his mouth and then bites down, not too hard, just enough for Dean to feel it.  His hips thrust upward involuntarily and Jax drives his knee between Dean’s thighs to hold him in place.

 

“Slow,” Jax says, resuming his exploration of Dean’s body with his hot mouth.  He leaves a line of sucking marks down Dean’s side, makes Dean squirm when he reaches a ticklish spot, laughs hot and rough against the hard muscle of Dean’s belly.

 

Dean threads his fingers through Jax’s hair, exerts a little pressure, urging the man south, but Jax only laughs again, a filthy sound, and avoids Dean’s straining cock in favor of licking down the sweaty join of his thigh where the muscles jump and twitch.

 

Jax’s hot breath on his sack immediately followed by an even hotter tongue make Dean shout, and Jax looks up from his work to smirk and say, “Shhh.  You want Gemma in here with a camera?”

 

Then he moves lower, shouldering Dean’s knees wide to pull the tender skin behind his sack into this teeth.  The breath freezes in Dean’s throat. 

 

Then he lets it out in a shaking exhale, and Jax lays the broad flat of his tongue on Dean’s hole and licks upward.

 

Dean bucks against Jax’s mouth, writhes for more contact, and is rewarded when Jax makes an arrow of his tongue and drives it into Dean’s hole, following it with a finger that has Dean breathing a string of strangled curses and clutching the sheets to tearing with desperate need.

  
“C’mon,” he begs.  “C’mon.”  And Jax adds a second finger.

 

Dean whines, abandoning what’s left of his control, thrusting against the dual intrusion, trying to hit that secret spot inside that will spark him up.

 

Jax pulls his mouth away with a thick wet sound that makes Dean grunt, and replaces his tongue at once with a third finger, canting up and driving into Dean’s body.

  
Dean goes rigid with sensation as that sensitive place is struck once and then again.  Jax wraps a rough hand around Dean’s cock and strokes once, twice, a third time, before Dean spurts hotly over Jax’s hand and his own belly.

 

Before Dean can gather a breath of musk-heavy air, Jax is shoving Dean’s knees up and back and moving himself into place.

  
Before he can say, “Fuck, yeah,” Jax is adding the wetness from Dean’s belly to his hand and slicking himself.

 

Before he can embarrass them both with words they shouldn’t even be thinking, Jax is nudging up to his still-pulsing hole and coming inside.

 

He has time to consider that they’re face to face this time, Jax holding him down, driving into him, and then Jax is grunting, saying, “Dean, fuck, oh fuck, Dean,” and coming with broken breath and broken rhythm, filling Dean with heat.

 

Jax collapses against him, panting breath wet on Dean’s neck, sticky weight making it hard for Dean to breathe.  And for a stretch of breaths, he doesn’t care, which scares him a little.

 

When Jax levers himself up to look at Dean from inches away, to show him what’s in his face, what he sees there scares him more.

 

“I—“ Jax starts, but whatever potentially dangerous admission he was going to make is interrupted by a pounding on the door and Ope’s warning voice saying, “Jax,” before the door is shoved open and the VP is in the room.

 

“Get dressed.” He’s curt, and Dean’s eyes go to Jax’s face, which shows a burning displeasure that’s about to become incendiary.

 

“What the fuck, Ope?  You think you can—“

 

“There’s a visitor at the gate looking for Dean.”

 

Ope’s voice is even with the kind of neutrality one adopts when he’s already figured the outcome but doesn’t feel like sharing.  Dean feels a chill that has nothing to do with the drying spunk on his belly or the fact that Jax has moved away to rise and dress.

 

“Get out,” Jax says, voice rough and cold.

 

Ope nods tightly, gives Dean a dark look, and leaves, pulling the door closed behind him.

 

Jax starts, “I’m sorry—“

 

But Dean stops him.  “It’s okay.  This is more important.”

 

That stops Jax, who’s halfway into his jeans.  “Maybe.  But this was pretty damned important, too.”

 

He’s half-smiling like he can mitigate the admission buried in the relatively innocent words, but Dean hears it and nods, says, “Yeah,” voice fucked rough, tight with unsaid things.

 

When he gets up to dress, he feels a soreness that he’s going to carry with him for awhile and a secret pleasure at that.  He uses an edge of the sheet to wipe his belly clean, slides back into his borrowed clothes.  When he’s in his boots and armed, Jax gives him a look, hand already on the doorknob.

 

“You ready?”

 

“As I’ll ever be,” Dean answers.  It’s a lie, but then, so are a lot of things.

 

He stops himself from glancing at the ruined, damp bed, stops himself from blushing when Gemma winks and Kerry and J.C. start whispering to each other behind the bar.

 

Stops himself from shaking at the thought of what’s coming.

  
Jax is holding the door when he gets to it, says, “Your car?”

 

Dean nods, mouth too dry to speak. 

 

He rethinks his choice when Jax slides into the passenger’s seat, whistles low, says, “Nice.”

 

Another nod.

 

He’s happy to have simple things—turning the starter, putting her in reverse, backing her out—to concentrate on.  Fear is a living thing coming awake inside of him, crawling up his throat, making the place between his eyes ache and his breath come tight in his chest.

  
Against his breastbone, the amulet pulses and burns.

 

The drive to the junker bunker takes an eon, Jax silent beside him, one knee jumping.  He’s obviously nervous himself, and Dean should offer words of comfort—or at least distraction—but he can’t.  There is no comfort for what’s coming, nothing to distract them from the fetid stench of death raining now from the roiling black overhead, from the certainty that they’re riding toward doom.

 

He stops the Impala before the minefield, and they walk the road on foot, guns out when they get to the winding maze of junkers, leading them as they come to the narrow opening known as “the gate.”

 

Not that guns are going to do them a fucking bit of good.

 

Doom is standing in the single bright spot-light of a bunker-mounted klieg, a dozen feet from where the last of the rust buckets stops its slow decay in a series of oil stains.

 

He’s smiling like a marching band is about to strike up reunion music.

 

“Hey, Dean,” he says.  “Good to see you.”

 

Whatever power of speech Dean might have had has fled with the sight of Sam standing there in jeans and sneakers, grey hoodie over a long-sleeved tee, mess of hair ringing his sharp-featured face.

 

“You know this guy?”

 

Dean jumps a little, startled.  He’d forgotten all about Jax at his side, so caught up in the lie in front of them that he didn’t remember all the ones he was bringing with him to this meeting.

 

The thing wearing Sam’s face assumes a hurt expression, and Dean has to bite his tongue to throbbing to keep from howling his outrage.  He knows what’s coming.

 

“I’m hurt.  You mean Dean didn’t tell you about me?  I’m Sam.  His brother.”

 

The amulet flares to life beneath Dean’s shirt, and he gasps a little at the pain.  He can’t turn to look at Jax, can’t see the way betrayal paints his face.

 

“What do you want?”  He grinds out, teeth clenched to keep his heart from crawling out of his throat.  This is worse than he’d ever imagined, and he’s seen this meeting a thousand times in nightmares both sleeping and awake.

 

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”  Sam turns his eyes to Jax and tsks.  “Dean always did have a problem with manners.”

 

“Shut up,” he manages.  His hands are clenched, shoulders trembling with tension.  He thinks he might vomit if he has to say another word.

 

“Never mind.  I can smell who you are from here.  Never thought I’d see the day my poonhound brother shifted to stick, Dean.  All those lonely nights on the road together could have been a lot more interesting…”

 

“Shut up,” he repeats, a little stronger for the rage burning away the frozen spot inside where his heart used to beat.  “You aren’t my brother.  My brother’s dead.  Just tell me what you want and then get the fuck out of here.”

 

“Impatient, as always.  And stubborn.  Not to mention stupid.”

 

“Dean—“ Jax starts, low, his voice a warning, but Dean can’t spare Jax even a glance, can’t take his eyes off of what’s left of his brother. 

 

“You know what I want, Dean.  What I’ve _always_ wanted.  Why do you think I’ve come here?  For you, of course.  I’ll make it simple, since you’re the slow one.  You come out to me tonight and I’ll lay this town to waste in one clean blast.  No suffering, no screaming, no torture.  They’ll go in their sleep.  Poof.”  Sam’s long fingers make a sharp snap that seems to echo inside Dean’s chest.

 

“And if he doesn’t want to play with you?”  Jax’s voice is sneer over fear, and Dean wants to tell him to go back to the clubhouse, to get away from here, not to draw any more attention to himself than he already has.

  
Too late.

 

“I’ll take this town apart.  We’ll bring hell to earth right here in Charming.  Fiends’ holiday, a free-for-all worthy of the end times.  And when you’re all drowning in your own blood, too shattered from screaming to even beg for mercy, we’ll put you back together so we can start all over again.  Ask Dean.  I’m sure he can fill you in on the details, can’t you, brother?”

 

“I’ll come.”

 

“Dean!”

 

Dean’s focused on Sam’s face, on the eyes that show no sign of the brother he loved, on the set of the shoulders, so familiar and yet somehow not quite right. 

 

On the smirk that curls his lip up like he’s about to insult Dean in a particularly amusing way.

 

He has to swallow a stream of acid that comes up his throat at the familiar expression.

 

“I’ll come on one condition:  you leave Charming alone.  No blast, no end times at all. Charming’s a DMZ, and it stays that way.”

 

Sam shakes his head.  “You think there’s still room to bargain?  You think I can’t come right in past this paltry barrier?  You think the sorry excuse for a watchdog you’ve got is going to keep me out?  Please.  You know me better than that, brother.”

 

The cloud behind Sam’s head thickens, takes definite form, faces twisted in torturous agony, hands reaching like they long to tear thin flesh to shreds.  And a sound, hideous in its loneliness, its pain, bringing tears to Dean’s eyes and down his face.

  
Beside him, Jax gasps.

 

On his chest, the amulet sears into him, radiating pain along the bones, lighting up his blood like napalm.  He tries to keep in his scream, tries not to stagger and fall to his knees.  That position is too much like begging.  Or praying.

 

Finally, seeing the joy on his brother’s face at their pain, Dean gives up.  “Fine.  I’ll come.  Give me an hour.”

  
“Dean, no,” Jax sobs, strain evident in his voice.

 

For the first time, Dean tears his eyes away from this parody of Sam to see his lover, whose face is streaked with tears, lips drawn back in a grimace of pain, hands clenched to keep from trying to tear the fire from beneath his skin.

 

As he watches, his own pain eases, and Jax staggers as he’s released from what was riding him.

 

Glancing back, he sees Sam smiling like he used to when he’d see Dean after a long day of research, or when they’d have spent some time apart and were coming together again with good news.

 

He chokes back a cry and turns away, says, “One hour,” over his shoulder and moves back toward the car.  Every step is heavy, like he’s aged in the last few minutes.  His bad knee aches, his breath comes only with effort, the amulet pierces him steadily with its fiery knife.

 

Jax is trying to talk to him, but he can’t hear anything over the sound of Sam’s voice, can’t see much but memories he’s spent almost three years burying.

 

He doesn’t remember walking the road through the minefield, doesn’t remember giving Jax the keys, either, until they’re actually moving back through town and he realizes once more where he is.

 

Jax says nothing as they pull up to the fence beside the bikes, as they get out and head for the clubhouse.

 

Says nothing as they near the door.

 

Jax reaches for the door handle and then follows the motion through, gaining momentum to drive his fist into Dean’s face and knock him onto his ass.

 

“Did you bring this on us, you motherfucker? Did you?”  Jax’s voice is raw with rage and hurt, his face wild with it.

 

He aims a kick at Dean’s ribs, guaranteed to do some damage if Dean hadn’t rolled at the last second, and then charges after him shouting to grab him by the back of the shirt and throw him—fucking throw him—into the side of the clubhouse.

  
Dean hits shoulder-first, feels it pop out of place, scrapes his hands on the gravel and struggles to put the wall to his back so he can walk himself upright.

  
Jax is right there, fisting his borrowed “Sons” shirt, breath sharp with anger, eyes hot, shaking him—bang, bang, bang—against the wall.

 

Dean keeps his head from hitting but lets Jax do it, waits until the man has stopped to try to meet his eyes.

  
He tastes blood, feels gingerly around his lip to find the cut, shoves his tongue in to make it sting.  He deserves it.

 

“I should fucking kill you myself,” Jax says.  There are tears in his eyes, though, and his voice is low and thick, and Dean’s nodding and trying not to cry himself, and that’s the tableau, them frozen in sorrow and blood against the wall, when Ope bursts out of the door, followed by Sack and Gemma and Chibs and Juice.

 

They ring them in a half-circle, maybe waiting for their turns, and Gemma says, carefully, “Jax, what’s wrong, baby?”

 

Jax doesn’t relent on the pressure of his hands against Dean’s chest, but he looks back over his shoulder at his mother.

  
“He brought the fucking devil to our door, that’s what’s wrong.  His brother is the goddamned devil.”

 

*****

 

 _People think that the end of a man’s life is the end of his choices, but people are wrong.  The choice a man has at the end might be the most important of all:  to go out like his life means something, even if it didn’t before, or to let it go like it’s not worth remembering and so die with that final regret in his head.  Me, I want to die with my arms and eyes wide open.  I want to feel the minute death steals between my teeth, and I want to bite that fucker’s head off._   (Book of Johns 52:1-4)

 

His mother’s eyes go to Dean, and there’s hurt there, sure, a lesser betrayal from the one Jax can feel choking him, but there’s something else, too, speculation, maybe, like Gemma knows something Jax doesn’t.

  
“What is it, Mom?” He asks, not relaxing his hold on Dean.  He can feel the other man’s chest heaving beneath his hands, knows it must be hurting him, and doesn’t care. 

 

“I think we’d all better go inside and talk about this,” she says.

 

Jax shakes his head.  “I’m not bringing him in my house.”

 

“Jax—“ she starts, voice chiding, but Opie cuts her off.

 

“You want me to kill him for you?”

 

He looks like he really wants to have that pleasure, and Jax is momentarily grateful, a warmth in his chest for his friend’s loyalty and love.

 

Then he puts his eyes back on Dean, and the heat withers into something cold and dry, replacing all feeling.

 

“I’ll kill him myself if that’s what it takes.”

 

Dean nods like Jax has said something wise, and he slams Dean against the wall again.  The man doesn’t even try to resist, just keeps his head from striking.

 

“Jax,” Gemma says again, this time from much closer.  He turns to see her standing right beside him.  She lays a hand on his near arm, not tugging, just holding.  “This isn’t his fault.  It was in the prophecy.”

 

“No,” and his voice is heavy with denial and pain and a creeping despair that he can’t seem to hold back.  “You aren’t listening.  His brother is the devil.”

 

And for the first time in the glacial age since Jax began beating the shit out of him, Dean speaks.

 

“That thing is not my brother.”  He sounds like he’s gargling broken glass, and Jax resists looking at Dean.  If the pain on his face is half what Jax can hear in Dean’s voice, it might break down his resolve. 

 

“Jax, please.”  Gemma’s voice is soft and sad, and Jax sees in her eyes a shadow of the sorrow she wore like a shroud for years after Clay died.  He can’t resist that, no matter how much the piece of shit he’s got in his hands deserves to die bloody.

 

He lets him go with a shove, and Dean swallows a gasp when he strikes the wall with his right shoulder.  For the first time, Jax notices how Dean’s arm is hanging, realizes it’s dislocated.

 

He refuses to feel guilty.  Fucker has it coming.  All of it.

 

Dean stumbles upright, away from the wall, and Ope shoulders in to push him ahead of them through the door Sack is holding open.  Dean staggers at the blow, and Ope repeats it.  A third hard shove sends Dean hurtling into a table, which he strikes with his one good hand before falling sideways between two chairs. 

 

“Get up, you piece of shit,” Ope growls, stepping toward him.

 

Jax grabs Opie’s arm.  “It’s okay, Ope.  Let him up.”

 

It takes Dean a couple of tries, his face drawn and pale, bad arm hanging uselessly, before he’s seated in a chair.  Piney and Bobby come from their stools at the bar to join the rest of the club.

 

On the couch, Tig moans, and Jax turns to see the prophet has foam sliding down his cheek and wetting his hair.

  
“He’s bad,” Gemma says.  “And getting worse.”

 

Jax nods tightly.  He can’t do anything about that right now.

 

“Dean’s brother’s the devil,” Juice summarizes for the sake of the two elder members, who are looking a little bewildered at the turn of events.

 

“He’s not—“

 

“Shut up!” Opie barks.

  
“Ope, let him talk.”

 

“Jax—“ 

 

Jax can hear Opie’s plea, his worry.  He knows his best friend just wants to put this to rest, to ease Jax’s pain the only way he knows how.  But there’s something going on here, something more than mere betrayal.  His mother’s face is shining with a certainty that belies all evidence to the contrary.

 

“That _thing_ is not my brother.  He’s just wearing Sam’s body.  Sam’s his meat suit.  That’s all.  My brother…  My brother died two and a half years ago, when Lucifer rose from Hell.”

 

The words sound like they’ve been dragged from the pit of Hell with Lucifer, only to reach the tense air of the clubhouse now, a journey of a million miles of pain, and Jax can see the effort it takes Dean even to say his brother’s name.  His own hurt shrinks in the face of Dean’s obvious anguish.

 

But even if the pain can’t lie, Jax isn’t sure he trusts Dean’s explanation, and he refuses to be swayed by how hollow and alone Dean looks sitting there, ringed by angry faces.

 

“He just happened to choose your brother?”

 

And there it is, a minute hesitation in Dean’s posture, some minor jerking of the tension in his shoulders, the way a vein tics under his left eye.

 

“You lie to me again, I’ll waste you right here,” Jax promises, pulling his gun, pointing it, and taking off the safety.

 

“It’s…complicated.”

 

“Make it simple.  Tell us what you know or die now.”

 

And the fucker laughs.  A weak imitation of the sound, true, but a laugh nonetheless.  Jax’s finger tightens on the trigger guard.

 

“Die now or die…”  His eyes travel over Jax’s shoulder, and he realizes Dean’s looking at the beer clock by the couch.  “…in forty-seven minutes.  That’s a tough one.”

 

“No saying he’ll kill you right away.”  And Jax can feel the nasty smile on his face when he says it.

 

“No.  No, he probably won’t.”  Perversely, Dean’s voice seems to gain strength as he continues.  “He’ll probably fuck me first, maybe a few times, until I’m nice and loose, and then turn me over to the other demons for a crack.  After that, it’ll be every kind of torture imaginable, and some you can’t even think of in your worst nightmares.  Remember, I was in Hell once already.  I don’t need a preview.  This’ll just be the sequel.”

 

“Bullshit,” Ope says, but when Dean fixes his eyes on the other man, Jax sees, even out of his periphery, the way Ope’s expression changes, the way he shifts his weight a little away from the look Dean levels at him. 

 

Dean returns his eyes to Jax.  “Look, I fucked up.  I lied to you, yeah.  But not about the important thing, which is that I’m here to stop the world from ending.  You have to trust me at least that far—let me do my job.  Let me do what only _I_ can do.”

 

“And what’s that?  Give yourself up for the great demon gang bang?”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “You’re not going to like it.”

 

“There’s a lot of that going around,” Jax observes, and he engages the safety and lowers his gun.  He doesn’t put it away, though.  He’s not that stupid, even if he is, apparently, blind to some obvious things.

 

“It involves your mom,” Dean says, eyes shifting to Gemma, who’s standing on the other side of Jax.

 

The gun’s up and ready again before the first sounds of protest leave several mouths at once.

  
Bobby and Piney are both growling away, Juice saying something about “—been through enough,” Chibs chiming in with something outraged and indecipherable.

 

Gemma silences everyone by stepping between the gun and Dean.

 

“Mom—“

 

“You’re not going to shoot him, Jax, so put it away.”

 

“Goddamnit, Mom—“

 

“God’s not going to do that, Jax.  He’s going to save us all, if we let Him.  And the Shepherd is the one who can lead us.”

 

Jax’s hand trembles and he drops the gun to hide the shaking.  His mother’s voice is far away, like it was before, when she was lost in her own head, gone from him.

 

But in the next moment, she’s giving him an irritated and impatient look and saying, “Put the fucking gun away, Jax.  What’re you going to do, shoot me?”

 

She pulls up a chair and sits in front of Dean, taking his one good hand between her two.

 

“You love my son, so I’m going to forgive you for lying to him.  But if you ever hurt him again like this, I’ll rip your balls off myself, you got it?”

 

Dean’s eyes widen, and he nods, swallows visibly, says, “Yes, ma’am.”

 

“Good.  Now, why don’t you finish explaining how you’re going to save the world.”

 

Twenty minutes later, Jax is muttering, “No.  No fucking way,” and pacing the length of the pool table.  Tig is moaning steadily on the couch, body wracked with tremors, eyes opening and closing frenetically.  Chibs is downing shots as fast as J.C. can pour them.  And Sack is staring off into the middle distance like he’s just had some sort of epiphany.

 

“Give me five minutes, Dean, and I’ll meet you by your car,” Gemma says calmly, standing up and heading down the hall toward the living quarters.

  
Jax calls out, “Mom—“  But she just waves a hand over her shoulder and calls, “It’s okay, baby.”

 

Jax turns furious eyes to Dean, who looks like the explanation took the last of it out of him.  His face is sallow, pale turning to yellow, his back bowed in an arch as he leans over the table.  J.C. hesitates a couple of feet behind Dean, a shot glass and bottle in her hand, eyes darting from Dean to Jax and back again.

 

He waves her forward, and she offers a drink to Dean, who rubs his face with his good hand and drags a poor imitation of a flirtatious smile up from some private reserve where he keeps those things.  She smiles back, a watery, frightened quirking of the lips, and leaves the bottle, skittering away like Dean might bite her.

 

Jax sinks wearily into the chair his mother just vacated and waits until Dean’s eyes open and a whiskey shudder passes through him before he speaks.

 

“Anything happens to my mother, I’ll kill you whether the world ends or not.  I’ll find you in hell and think up new ways to hurt you.”

 

Dean nods, jaw tightening.  “Yeah,” he says eventually, setting the glass down with a sharp sound. 

 

“How do I know you aren’t in league with Sam?”

 

Dean flinches at the sound of his brother’s name, but Jax refuses to feel bad about it.  Guy brought this on himself.

 

“You don’t, I guess.  But way I see it, you don’t have a helluva lot of choices now, do you?”

 

And there’s the problem, really, for Jax.  This situation is entirely out of his control, was maybe from the beginning—prophecies, Shepherds, Dean’s body stretched out under him, his taste in Jax’s mouth.

 

Jax blows out a nervous cough and shifts in his seat.  “You need anything before the smackdown?”

 

Dean’s got his head down, looking at his hands, shaking his head in the negative.  But just before Jax is about to stand up, Dean brings his eyes up and looks Jax square in the face.

 

There’s need written in every line, and sadness, regret, sorrow, anguish—a whole catalogue of human suffering.  It strikes Jax like a physical blow, makes it a little hard for him to take in a full breath.  And he can’t help it when he reaches out a hand and touches Dean’s cheek, wiping away the evidence of earlier tears, and then the edge of his full lips, dried blood flaking away under his fingers.

 

Ope has moved up behind Dean, mouth set, eyes grim, and Jax looks up at him even as Dean’s eyes are fluttering closed, even as he’s leaning minutely into the caresses.

 

Jax stands suddenly, Dean’s eyes fly open.  “Let’s go,” he says shortly, and Dean struggles to his feet.

 

With a nod at Ope, which is the moment Dean realizes the big man’s behind him, eyes going wide in almost comical surprise, Jax grabs Dean’s bad hand and pulls the arm toward him, Opie at the same time bracing the ruined shoulder.

 

With a twist and a sickening, thick noise, the shoulder’s back in place, Dean chanting out a series of vicious words even as Ope is lifting his hands away like they’ve gotten dirty just touching the hunter.

 

Gemma reappears from the back, wearing a fresh, white shirt, something gauzy, over a tank top, her hair down around her face in perfect waves, her smile beautiful and distant.

 

An ache sets up a constant warning in the center of Jax’s chest, but he tries not to let her see his hand shaking when he reaches out to take her own.  Dean leads the way, unsteady, to the exterior door, Jax and Gemma following, Gemma trailing behind Jax trustingly, her hand in her son’s. 

 

The others file out behind them and form a rough semi-circle as they reach the Impala. 

 

“Godspeed,” Chibs says. 

 

Ope steps forward like he’d stop Jax, and Jax gives him the tiniest shake of the head and then wrestles a grin onto his face from some memory of happiness.  “Don’t fuck the club up while I’m gone.”

 

Opie nods, manages a smile of his own.

 

And that’s it for goodbyes.

 

“You’re in no shape to drive,” Jax observes, pulling Dean’s keys from his own pocket, where he’d kept them from their earlier retreat.

 

Dean shakes his head.  “I’ve been worse.  I’m driving.”  There’s no room for argument in Dean’s tone, and they have less than ten minutes before the deadline’s up, so Jax gives in with a disgusted sound and hands the keys over. 

 

He hands his mother into the front seat, climbs into the back, leans over the front seat to be closer to her.  To them both, if he were being truthful, which he’s not.

 

The ride to the gate is short as always, the scene that greets the three of them as they leave the narrow opening of the junker bunker on foot eerily identical to earlier—Sam in his street clothes in the center of the klieg’s bright beam, living cloud of evil roiling eagerly at his back, like it’s waiting for a word from him to begin.

 

“Cutting it kind of close, Dean,” the devil says, glancing at the watch he wears on one strong wrist.  “I was actually hoping you’d be late.  Wanted to come looking for you myself.”

 

Jax didn’t know Dean’s real brother, obviously, but he’s pretty sure from what little he’s heard that Sam was incapable of putting the kind of filthy emphasis into a single look that the devil manages when he lets his eyes wander the length of Gemma’s body, from feet to head and back down, lingering on her belly.

 

“Empty, isn’t it?” He asks her, conversationally.  Gemma jerks, hand flying to her abdomen.  Jax turns toward her, hands out, but she steps away from him, out into the no man’s land between the junker bunker and the devil himself.

 

One step.  Two.

 

“Mom!”

 

Dean raises a hand, says, “Don’t,” roughly, like he hasn’t got much breath left.

 

“You’ve brought sorrow screaming into the world already, haven’t you, Gemma?”

 

Sam’s smile is wicked, insidious, his snaked tongue making shivers of Jax’s skin.  He wants to rush forward and pull his mother back, stand between her and the sheer force of evil she’s confronting.

 

But then she speaks.

 

“I am the mother of sorrows, upon whom all mankind’s pain rests.  I have borne for the world its pain, brought it out so that all might see and know the suffering man has made of and for man.  And now I command it.”

 

Gemma raises her hand, which seems so slight and small against the mass of blackness gathering just over her head.

 

She looks up into the cloud, up at her hand, fisted like it’s holding something.  Then she says, in a voice achingly normal, a voice out of his childhood when Jax was afraid and she would soothe his fears away, “It’ll be alright, baby.  It’s gonna be alright.”

 

Then she opens her hand, opens it wide like she’s letting something go, and the cloud above her head starts to circle, speeding up, like a funnel of malevolent intent arrowing in on the fixed point of her upraised face.

 

And she begins to sing—“Amazing Grace,” a hymn Jax had all but forgotten, a song she’d used as a lullaby over Tommy’s sickbed all those years and sorrows ago.

 

And the spinning cloud ceases, stills, like the held breath at the center of the cyclone.  But there is struggle in all that seething mass, struggle to strike out against her.

 

Dean moves forward, then, abandoning Jax, who doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now that it’s come to it.  As though he’s read his mind, Dean says, “Take care of your people, Jax.  And yourself.”

 

And so Jackson Teller is witness to what comes next and which he cannot escape, waking or sleeping, forever after.

 

***** 

 

 _I’m not fool enough to think I’ll get to choose my end or know it when it comes.  Chances are, there won’t be any choice involved.  But I hope my boys remember that I died for them, to make this world a little better than it was before.  I hope my death means something to them.  I don’t care if anyone else remembers me, as long as the ones I love do._ (Book of Johns 55:22-26)

 

Dean sees the moment the power shifts in Gemma’s favor, sees her awful peril and doesn’t flinch.  It’s time to get it over, after all, and if the weariness in his heart matches the arid space where his soul used to be, that’s all the better for dying.

 

He can’t say goodbye to Jax in any meaningful way.  Who is he to put shit on the man who’ll have to clean up the mess they made of this world?  No, he learned a lot from his father’s exit, but first of the lessons was not to say too much or leave burdens behind that get too heavy to carry.

 

Instead, he says, “Take care of your people, Jax,” which doesn’t seem like a tall order, considering the job the man’s already done.  And then, because he can’t help it, he adds, “And yourself.”  Maybe that’s going to be harder.  Maybe Dean’s made it harder.  He hasn’t got the right to speculate, and besides, time’s up.

 

The devil spreads his arms in a familiar gesture of challenge, the way Sam would do it when he was pissed off and wanted Dean to see his way.

 

Dean would like to be done with seeing his brother in the monster standing there, but he can’t.  Not yet.  There’s one thing left he needs to remember about Sam.  One thing left.

 

As he nears the thing that’s wearing his brother’s face, the amulet on Dean’s chest starts to move sickeningly beneath his skin, like it’s eager to burst outward. At the same time, shooting tendrils of agony wrap around his ribs, slide down his spine to tighten and clutch at his guts, writhe in spasmodic lines around his thighs to weaken them.

 

He keeps going, despite the growing impossibility of it, the enormity of his agony a remembered lesson from his days downstairs.

 

Dean walks right up to the devil, within two feet, within one, violating his personal space and choking back the retching that comes of taking in the devil’s stench.  This close, there’s no mistaking the beast for his brother. 

 

“Dude, you don’t have showers in hell?  God, you reek!” 

 

Sam’s lips curl up in a derisive smile that his brother himself had never quite mastered.  The elastic of his face just couldn’t twist into such evil.

 

Dean steps through the gagging miasma of sulfur and rot, of dead things left untended, of the sweat of despair, and embraces his brother.

 

The amulet leaps between them, fusing in an arc of electric heat that bows Dean’s spine and has him screaming up into the beloved, abhorred face.

 

Lucifer likewise screams, struggling to shake Dean off, shoving at him with his hands, wrenching himself backward in an undignified, desperate scrabble.

  
Dean hangs on.

 

Dean hangs on to the brother he loved, to the Sam he remembers, screaming through the pain to bring one bright moment to mind, one shearing light of happiness to pare away the monster and invoke the very last of Sam, his Sam.

 

If he could do it another way, he would.  What’s left of his brother in there should never see the light of day.  The mewling wreck of a man that crawls to the surface of Lucifer’s face is nothing Dean wants to know, nothing he ever wants to see.

 

“Sammy!” he cries, the amulet driving knives through his spine, weakening his hold on the thing that’s taken Sam, that’s stronger than he is—impossibly strong, inevitably victorious.

 

“Sammy!” He screams, tears searing his face, spit running from the corners of his mouth.  His throat is filling with the taste of metal, with the smothering odor of Hell and the bloody destruction the amulet wreaks on his insides, but Dean tries one last time, summoning into his mind a picture of Sam at thirteen racing up the three steps of their rental unit at the Roaring Oaks, saying, “Dean!  Dean, guess what?”

 

Dean can’t remember what had Sam so happy; he only knows that his brother was smiling, one of the rare and uncomplicated looks his brother sometimes summoned from the soup of adolescent angst.

 

He does his best to hold onto it, to say, “Sammy,” in a tone that communicates the love he has for his brother, the way he’d never, ever let that Sam go.

 

His brother answers. 

 

“Dean?”

 

And for a single moment, the pain abates, enough to let Dean hear his brother’s—his true brother’s—voice.  In that stillness, in the cessation of pain, Dean sees his brother looking back out of fear-wide eyes.

 

“Sammy, it’s okay,” he says.  It’s a lie, but it won’t be for long.  “I love you, Sam,” he says, renewing his embrace, wrapping his arms strong around Sam.

  
Sam’s arms come up around Dean’s shoulders, too, and he says, “Dean?” again, in a small voice, the kind he’d have when he was very small and something frightened him.

 

“It’s okay,” Dean says again, hearing Gemma’s hymn riding a high note toward grace.

 

And then the mindless inferno strikes them, hammering down onto Dean’s bent head, bringing shrieks from Sam and Dean both, bringing screaming from behind him, where Dean cannot find the strength to look, bringing utter annihilation and ultimate ruin on the world.

 

With an obliterating flash of lightning, everything goes white and then dark, and then Dean knows nothing else but blackness, plummeting down into it in a familiar way, sighing his defeat as he lets go, of Sam, of this world, of himself.

 

*****

 

 _If there’s a heaven, it’ll be the sort of place where we can love each other without complication and kill each other without regret._ (Book of Johns [Apocryphal text] 1:1)

 

The reaper standing in front of Jax is real, from the bony claw clutching the scythe to the vacant smile of gaping teeth.  Where the eyes should be, bottomless pits suck him in, until he has to look away or fall forever.

 

He might be dreaming.

  
He hopes he’s dreaming.

 

The hand on his shoulder that shakes him awake assures him that he is.

  
Groaning, Jax sits up, sheet pooling at his waist, rubs a hand across his chest and cracks his eyes open.

 

Rita is holding a cup of coffee and the cordless phone.

 

“Opie,” she says, giving him a little smile, uncertain and maybe afraid.  Jax doesn’t always wake up right these days.

 

“Thanks, sweetcheeks,” he says, giving her a lame excuse for a smile.  It takes the fear out of her eyes, though, and that makes Jax feel okay.

 

“Yeah,” he says on the tail end of his first swallow of hot coffee.

 

“We’ve got him.”

 

Jax puts the coffee down on the night stand so fast it sloshes, but he can’t be bothered to rescue the skin mag soaking up the liquid as he leaps out of bed.

 

“I’ll be there in five.”

 

“No.  Don’t—…I mean, he’s not here.  We know where he is.”

 

Jax clenches his jaw to keep from shouting his frustration, grips the phone tighter to keep from throwing it.

 

“Where?”  He asks.

 

“It’s…not that simple,” Ope answers.

  
The phone doesn’t survive Jax’s response.

 

Since there’s no real urgency in dressing, Jax chooses with care not typical of him.  These days, though, he’s sensitive to choices, to stupid little shit that didn’t used to matter.

  
What his shirt says—in this case, “Sons,” a deliberate and painful reminder of the other person who wore a shirt just like it once.

 

The cut with its now ironic icon glowering from his back.

 

The ring on the leather chord around his neck:  a plain gold wedding band, inscription hidden by his shirt.  It sits just behind the stenciled “Sons” and the symbolism doesn’t escape Jax.

 

Bitterly, Jax considers that nothing escapes him anymore.  He sees everything with a clarity of judgment that sometimes threatens to drive him crazy.

 

He guesses it’s the last of God’s “gifts” to mankind, meant to help him rebuild the world.

 

“Fuck you,” he says to God, or maybe to himself, or maybe to the world itself. 

 

Leaving his room, Jax detours, as he usually does, to stand by his dad’s bike for a minute, and to look at the memorial that’s been added since the world didn’t end.

 

A picture of Gemma and John, both of them leaning up against the very bike that takes up most of the space here.  Beside it a picture of Gemma and Clay standing in the sun in front of the garage.  A dried red rose from her casket.  A copy of John Teller’s book.

 

And, maybe incongruously to those who don’t know it, don’t understand what happened there, a scarred leather journal, snap broken, pages sticking out in disarray, and a set of Chevy keys in a plain glass ashtray.

 

Jax picks the keys up from their place of honor, retrieves the journal and puts it in the back of his pants, transfers the gun to his waistband, where he’s usually smart enough not to keep it.

 

These days, it pays to be reckless once in awhile.  God’s not going to let him die any time soon.  That would be too easy.

 

Of course, he could blow his own dick off.

 

Jax gives a dry cough of a laugh at where his brain is taking him and heads out to the bar, where Kerry greets him with a cup of coffee and a smile.

 

Bobby, Piney, and Juice are at a table eating breakfast.  Chibs is at another table going over a map, planning the next supply run.

 

“Where’s Sack?” he asks.

 

Chibs rolls his eyes and jerks his thumb toward the yard.

 

“Ah,” Jax says, nodding.  He knows where he’ll find the kid.

 

As expected, Sack is running a loving cloth over the gleaming hood of the Impala.

 

“Ope’s got a lead,” he says, and Sack stops what he’s doing, looks up, hope warring with cynicism in his young face.  The kid had really taken to Dean in the short time the hunter had been there.  Had taken it as a personal responsibility to care for the Impala as though its owner were coming back when all evidence suggested that Dean was dead, gone forever, sayonara, don’t pass go.

 

His look now says, _I’ll believe it when I see it._

 

“Yeah,” Jax says, just as though Sack had voiced it.  “Anyway, I’m taking her.”

 

Sack steps back a little hesitantly, opens his mouth, changes his mind, hands hanging at his side helplessly.

 

“I’ll take good care of her, kid.  Not a scratch.  Promise.”

 

Sack nods, swallows convulsively, hurries away toward the first bay and the Jeep, which is once again up on the lift, awaiting repairs before the next run.  It’s been eight months since the world stopped, reset, came back online.  Some things haven’t changed.

 

And some things have…

 

Where the junker bunker used to be is an enormous crater that still smokes and sends sulfurous clouds skyward, despite that there doesn’t seem to be any discernible crack where hellfire can seep through.

 

Bobby speculated that it was the last gateway into hell, closed now forever, where God smote Lucifer once and for all through his servant, Dean, and that the smoke is just a friendly reminder to them what can happen when man lets pride goeth before, et cetera.

 

Jax thinks it’s more like a divine “fuck you.”

 

Whatever the case, there hasn’t been any demon activity since that night when his mother died—her body recovered at the very lip of the crater, an expression of peace on her face like she was merely sleeping—and Dean disappeared, presumably sucked into hell with his brother, the devil.

 

And that might’ve been the end of Jax’s hope.  He might’ve buried his mother and tried to get over the loss of her, tried to wrap his mind around the man he loved—and in the long nights since that longest one, Jax has come to admit a lot of things to himself, among them how he felt about Dean, regardless of the length of their actual acquaintance—how the man he loved is suffering eternally in hell as a sacrifice to save the world.

 

Except that the last thing Tig said before he died, his sighted eyes wide on Jax’s wondering face, his hand clutched claw-like around Jax’s wrist, was, “The Shepherd is alive.  Find him.  He needs a flock.”

 

The prophet, whose sight had been restored only long enough for him to see Gemma’s body brought in and laid in state on the pool table, had sighed out a sob, said his last words, and died in his usual spot on the couch, where he’d laid in state himself until the burials could be arranged.

 

So Jax’s meager hope had been kept alive like the flame of a candle in a fierce storm, guarded only by a sense that Tig had been right more than not, especially at the end, and that there were things that needed explaining about the final confrontation.

 

Like how Jax himself, standing at ground zero for the explosion, survived it unscathed.

 

The reaper he sees in dreams seems to offer explanation, except its fleshless lips are too sibilant, the words unclear.  He only knows for sure that the skin of his back itches like the tattoo would come to life, which leads him to wonder what “marked for death” might actually have meant.

 

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  Jax is alive.  And now, so is Dean, maybe for sure this time.

 

Opie is waiting on the Charming side of the crater, beside a man wearing an odd assortment of clothes and a hat that looks like it might once have been part of a beaver.

 

“What’s up?”

 

“This guy says he’s got information on Dean.  Seems legitimate.”

 

Jax eyes the guy dubiously.  He smells—a lot—and seems a little off, his eyes not quite focusing on Jax’s face.

 

Still, Ope doesn’t usually bother him with leads unless they seem promising, so he says, “What’ve you got?”

 

“What’ll you give me?” The guy responds, predictably.  There might be more survivors out there than they’d initially expected, but that doesn’t mean the world’s gotten much better.  Charming is still paradise compared to what happens beyond its God-guarded gates.

 

“Sanctuary,” Jax says promptly.  “If your info pans out.  Until then, you can stay at the jail.”

 

Hale and he had worked it out as a reasonable way of handling the sporadic trickle of refugees.  Assuming people survive the God-test—and the lightning still forks from the clear blue sky, suggesting that Charming is, as Tig had prophesied,  the chosen land for rebuilding—they go into quarantine at the jail until they can be vetted for skills, abilities, and integrity.  Not everyone gets to stay for good.

 

The guy nods like this is the best news he’s ever heard.

 

“I came through the res a coupla weeks ago.”

 

“Which res?”

 

“Hopi, out in Arizona?” 

 

Jax nods to indicate he knows the one.

 

“Heard about a guy who’s there, white man, magic, they say.  Said he ‘appeared among them a dead man and rose again to life’ or some shit like that.  People are real secretive about him, though, don’t say much.  If I hadn’ta heard it from a kid I was selling hooch to, I wouldn’ta known it at all.”

 

Jax narrows his eyes, and the guy grows defensive.  “What?  Man’s gotta make a living.”

 

Nope, some things haven’t changed a bit.

 

“How’d you know to come here with it?”

 

Opie answers.  “We’ve had the word out for months.  People talk.”

 

“It’s all people talk about,” the man adds, fawning a little.  “Guy’s a legend, man.  How he saved the world at the cost of his soul.”

 

Jax has heard similar things from scavengers and drifters since the fateful night. 

 

“Hey, sorry about your mom,” the man adds, and Jax takes a menacing step in his direction.

  
The man cringes and puts his hands up, bowing his head, obsequious and creeping.  “No offense meant.  It’s just…people talk about her, too.”

 

Yeah, Jax supposes they do.

 

“Alright.  Ope, take him inside, give him to Hale.”

 

Ope nods.  “I’ll send Juice and Sack with you.”

 

Jax shakes his head.  “I’ve got this one, Ope.”

 

Ope pauses, eyes tight with worry.  “Jax—“

 

“I’ve got this,” he says again, no room for argument in his voice.

 

Ope nods unhappily and shoves the peddler ahead of him, in the direction of the testing ground. 

 

“So, you believe in god?” He hears his VP ask as they reach the hot spot.  Jax chuckles and jogs back to the Impala.  He keeps the Impala stocked with travel supplies, so he’s always ready to hit the road.

 

Behind him, thunder rumbles ominously.  Jax drowns it out with Metallica, the tape he’d found in the stereo when he’d gotten the car back after the end.

 

Hetfield warns about the dangers of nightmares coming to life, and Jax can’t help but laugh at that.  He doesn’t turn it off, though, just keeps driving, southeast to Arizona and to hope.

 

 

*****

 _I might be wrong about a lot of this._ (Book of Johns [Apocryphal Text] 2:1)

 

He hears her first, that distinctive rumble echoing in the narrow arroyo, bouncing around the tower rock that guards his latest home.

  
Cindy sets up a barking, wild and warning, but Sari simply wipes her hands clear of corn flour and says, “Hush.”

 

The dog subsides with a whine, big brown eyes fixed on her master.

 

Dean shakes his head.  “Traitor,” he mutters, but it’s without heat.  He puts down the leaky pump valve he’s been attempting to repair, wipes his hands on a rag, and stands.

 

It’s a slow process, getting upright.  The worst of the scarring still pulls at the edges when he moves too fast, and his left knee is treacherous at the best of times.  At the worst, it won’t hold his weight at all.  Dean reaches for the carved staff he keeps for the purpose of steadying himself—and which doubles nicely as a weapon, since his gun disappeared along with his clothes when he “died.”

 

He takes six steps in the direction of the rock and waits, putting himself firmly between Sari and Cindy and what he’s expecting to come around the rock in a minute.

 

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sari says, sidling up beside him.  Cindy sits down on his other side.

 

“Women,” he says under his breath.  Sari slaps him on the arm.

 

Despite knowing what he’s about to see, Dean can’t help take in a quick breath at the sight of Jax rounding the tower rock.  His face is careworn, tired, but it’s familiar, so familiar, something he sees almost nightly in dreams, at least in the ones that don’t involve his brother dissolving in a flash of melting fire.

 

He tries to let his breath out without shaking, but by the way Sari puts a comforting hand on his arm, he guesses he’s failed.  His feelings are always so much closer to the surface anymore.    
  


He insists he came back wrong.

  
Sari always laughs and says he wouldn’t know right if it bit him on the ass.

 

Jax is holding a gun low, parallel to his thigh, his finger along the trigger guard.  Dean can’t tell if the safety is off.

 

He shrugs away Sari’s hand, says, “Step back,” softly, almost a plea, shoos Cindy away with his foot.

 

To Jax he says, “Just do it,” no preamble, no greeting.  He’s ready.  Been ready since his brother died shrieking in his arms.

 

But Jax surprises him, reversing the gun in his hand to offer it, grip-first, to Dean.  “Thought you’d need this,” he explains.

  
When Dean takes the gun with the hand not holding the walking staff, Jax reaches to the back of his waistband.

  
Then, Dean thinks he understands.  Some sort of duel to the death.  Some heroic, honorable nonsense.

 

Bikers.  Such freakin’ drama queens.

  
Dean blows out a snort.  “Save it, kid.  Just kill me.  I’m not interested in twenty paces and all that bullshit.”

 

It’s Jax’s turn to snort as he produces John Winchester’s journal.

 

For the second time in as many minutes, Dean feels the breath driven from him.

“Don’t be an idiot.”  Sari repeats the injunction fondly.  “Why don’t you join us, Jax?  I was just fixing some lunch.”

 

Jax smiles and ducks his head.  “Thanks, ma’am.  I’d like that.”  As he swaggers past the frozen Dean, Jax pats the grinning Cindy on the head.  “Nice dog,” he remarks.

 

“Traitor,” Dean mutters again, feeling the ice in his belly break up and slide away.  He stows the gun in his waistband, turns haltingly, sees that Jax has paused before the hut door.

 

Sari is inside, singing over her corncakes, Cindy with her, probably, since she’s not out in the yard.

 

“Thought you’d want this back,” Jax says.  “The car, too.”  He jerks his chin in the direction of the tower.  Dean has to resist the urge to go out there and look at the Impala.

 

“Thanks,” Dean tries, throat tight and dry.  He clears it and tries again.  “Thank you.”

 

Then, raising his eyes to look Jax squarely in the face.  “I’m sorry about your mother.”

 

He sees the way Jax’s eyes lose their happy light, the way the muscle in his jaw tics as he clenches it.  But Jax doesn’t hit him or shoot him, the expected response.

 

Instead, he says, “It’s not your fault.  It had to be that way.  She knew it.  She tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen.  You tried to tell me, too.”

 

Dean nods, looks down at his boots.  There’s heat prickling behind his eyes, and he can’t speak for fear of the sounds he’ll make. 

 

Jax’s hand is suddenly on him, cupping the back of his bowed head, hot on the skin of his neck.  He leans in, lips close to Dean’s ear, bringing a shiver as he whispers, “I forgive you.  I love you.  Come home.”

 

Dean looks up, hope and fear warring for his features, eyes wet now, thin twin streams tracking down his face.

 

“Come home,” Jax repeats, not removing his hand but instead using it to draw Dean toward him, to rest their foreheads together, to share breath.

 

“Come home,” he says a third time, like an incantation or a prayer.

 

“Okay,” Dean says. 

 

Jax closes the space between them with a kiss that Dean returns, every ounce of what’s left of him to love given over in that instant of need and completion.

 

“Get a room,” Sari says from inside the adobe, where she stands holding a basket covered in a blue-and-white checked cloth.  “Somewhere else,” she adds, thrusting the basket at Dean.

 

Dean laughs, a wet, happy sound through the tears, and shakes his head.  “I didn’t bring the last one back.  You sure you trust me with another?”

 

“You’re good for it,” Sari says, shooing them away from her door and stepping out.  “Besides, I’m keeping the dog.”

 

Cindy sits at Sari’s side, mouth wide in a lolling doggy grin.

 

“Thank you,” Dean says, voice suddenly low with things unsaid.

 

She touches his arm, leans up to kiss him on the cheek, says, “Take care of him.”

 

She repeats the kiss and words with Jax, who blushes and nods shyly, like a little boy being kissed by an overzealous aunt.

 

“I’ll send your things along one of these days,” she promises, making another shooing motion.  “You’ve got everything you need already.”  Her eyes seem to take in the staff, Jax’s hand on Dean’s arm, the gun at Dean’s back, the journal in Jax’s other hand.

 

Dean nods, throat full of feelings he can’t possibly relate, and starts the slow walk toward the tower rock.

 

Behind him, Cindy barks, and he manages a, “Goodbye, girl.  Be good!”

 

Another bark, happier, follows.

 

They round the rock, out of sight now of Sari and Cindy.  Dean can’t look back, but he can barely stand to look ahead, either, to where his beloved car sits, dusty but unhurt, on the narrow road through the canyon.

 

“Sack’s been taking care of her,” Jax offers by way of explanation for her more-or-less immaculate condition.

 

“I owe the kid,” Dean says, low and rough.

 

Jax Dean stows the basket in the back seat.  Jax puts his father’s book beside it, and then Jax hands him the keys.

 

Dean feels a tight clutching in his chest as he shakes his head.  “Can’t.”  He sees Jax’s eyes widen a little, track to the mass of mounded, ugly scars visible above the collar of his tee shirt.  Sees him take in the staff, the way Dean leans on it.

 

“I’m more of a liability than a help,” Dean says suddenly. “Maybe you don’t—“

 

“Shut up,” Jax says.  “Get in.”

 

“You gonna order me around all the time now that you’re king of the freakin’ world?”  Dean asks as he settles into the passenger seat.

 

“Suck me,” Jax says, starting the car.

 

“Later,” Dean promises.  Jax’s foot slips on the brake.  “Unless you fuck up my car.  You gonna turn us around, or are you plannin’ on going all the way to California in reverse?”

 

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Jax answers, working the car around carefully.

 

When they’re facing nose-out, Jax reaches over to turn on the stereo, but Dean stops him with a hand on his wrist.

 

He waits until Jax is looking over at him, their faces inches away, the idling engine running counter to the mad pulsing of his heart in his chest, to the throbbing of nervous blood in his ears.

 

He clears his throat, opens his mouth.  “I love you,” he says, the words huge coming from him like he’s expelling an object he’d kept uncomfortably inside himself.

 

A smile breaks over Jax’s face like the sun coming out.

 

“I know,” he says in response to Dean’s declaration.

 

Dean’s smile is an answering brightness.  “Let’s go home.”

 

And they do.

 

 _Someone’s always claiming to have the last word on this or that, to know how it’s all going to end.  I say there’s no way to know, no way to be sure except to keep going until you get there.  And keep going after that, too._   (Book of Sons and Brothers, 1:1)

 


End file.
